The story can be read as narrating the gradual possession of the protagonist by a mysterious and possessive feminine spirit, or as a realistic description of a psychotic outbreak culminating in catatonia and murder, told from the psychotic subject's point of view. The precise description of the slow disintegration of the protagonist's mind is terrifying in either case.

At first blush, it's a conventional haunted house story involving an unsuccessful writer, who moves into an empty house in hope that isolation will help his failing creativity. His sensitivity and imagination are enhanced by his seclusion, but his art, his only friend, and his sanity are all destroyed in the process. . . .

George Oliver Onions was a 20th century British writer. Onions published over 40 novels and short story collections. Before becoming a writer Onions was a commercial artist. His first edition novels had full color paintings painted by him on their dust jackets. . In 1913 he legally changed his name to George Oliver but continued to use Oliver Onions as his pen name. Onions wrote detective stories, science fiction, ghost stories and historical fiction. Widdershins is his best know work about ghosts. The novella The Beckoning Fair is included. This novella is considered to be one of the best...

"A striking contribution to the literature of darkness." - Humbert Wolfe
"A disturbing study of spiritual domination . . . subtle and terrifying." - Daily Telegraph
"Mr. Onions is an inspired writer . . . A poet of prose." - John Betjeman
When Peter Byles's father dies shortly before the boy's thirteenth birthday, the young orphan is sent to live at the Victorian Gothic mansion of his father's friend, Dr. Kornelius Voyt. Peter arrives at the dreary house, surprised to find that he sees nothing of the enigmatic Voyt, instead passing his time in lessons with a young German tutor....

The three or four "To Let" boards had stood within the low paling as long as the inhabitants of the little triangular "Square" could remember, and if they had ever been vertical it was a very long time ago. They now overhung the palings each at its own angle, and resembled nothing so much as a row of wooden choppers, ever in the act of falling upon some passer-by, yet never cutting off a tenant for the old house from the stream of his fellows.

The tale I am setting out to tell has to do with the killing, on a May morning of the year 1919, of one young man by another who claimed, and still claims, to have been his friend. The circumstances were singular-perhaps even unique; the consequences affected a number of people in various interesting ways and byways; and since the manner of telling the story has been left entirely to me, I will begin with the breakfast-party that Philip Esdaile gave that morning at his studio in Lennox Street, Chelsea.

Lady Tasker had missed her way in the Tube. She had been on, or rather under known ground on the Piccadilly Railway as far as Leicester Square, but after that she had not heard, or else had forgotten, that in order to get to Hampstead by the train into which she had stepped she must change at Camden Town. Or perhaps she had merely wondered what Camden Town supposed itself to be that she should put herself to the trouble of changing there. With the newspaper held at arm's length, and a little figure-8-shaped gold glass moving slightly between her puckered old eyes and the page, she was reading...

"We'll take the little cable-tram, if you like, but it's not far to walk-twenty minutes or so-the Trwyn's seven hundred feet high. You'll see the whole of the town from the top. The sun will have made the grass a little slippery, but there are paths everywhere; the sheep began them, and then the visitors wore them bare. And we shall get the breeze....