George Oliver Onions (13 November 1873 – 9 April 1961) was an English novelist who published over forty novels and story collections.

Onions wrote detective fiction, social comedy and historical fiction; Poor Man's Tapestry (1946) and its prequel, Arras of Youth (1949) are about the adventures of a juggler, Robert Gandelyn, in the fourteenth century. Onions wrote two science fiction novels: New Moon (1918) about a utopian Britain, and The Tower of Oblivion (1921), featuring a middle-aged man who recedes back to his youth. Onions wrote several collections of ghost stories, of which the best known is Widdershins (1911). It includes the novella The Beckoning Fair One, widely regarded as one of the best in the genre of horror fiction, especially psychological horror.

On the surface, this is a conventional haunted house story: an unsuccessful writer moves into rooms in an otherwise empty house, in the 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. 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. Another theme, shared with others of Onions' stories, is a connection between creativity and insanity; in this view, the artist is in danger of withdrawing from the world altogether and losing himself in his creation. Another noted story from Widdershins is "Rooum", about an engineer pursued by a mysterious entity.

In this ebook:

Widdershins, 1911

A Case in Camera, 1920

The Tower of Oblivion, 1921

A Crooked Mile, 1914

The Story of Louie, 1913

Mushroom Town, 1914

The Debit Account, 1913

In Accordance with the Evidence, 1910