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Post by andydecker on Mar 3, 2020 18:42:32 GMT
I always thought it bizarre that the De Angelis brothers choose this name as a pseudonym for their music. When I read the name Oliver Onions I think first of Bud Spencer and Sandokan and not of the writer. Nobody in my group back then knew Onions the writer. But millions knew Oliver Onions the musicians.
Only in the mid-80s there were two books with stories and maybe novels, I don't know, translated as mass market paperbacks, in an imprint of classic phantastica.
I have to confess that I never read one of his stories.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Oct 21, 2021 19:30:08 GMT
On another note, I've just been reading "The Honey in the Wall" (1924), and there's a moment where one of the characters tells a ghost story, and the story turns out to be exactly the same as William Sansom's "A Woman Seldom Found" (1956). Until now, I'd always assumed that the Sansom tale was original - but is it actually quite a well-known folk-tale which I've somehow never hear before? A variant of the Onions/Sansom story also turns up as a scene in Sidney Sheldon's THE DOOMSDAY CONSPIRACY (1991). What, do you not read Sheldon?
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Post by Swampirella on Dec 5, 2021 14:29:27 GMT
I've finally finished Oliver Onions (apologies to any fans, but dear sweet Cthulhu that was heavy going). . . . I have been stuck about the half-way mark with the Onions collection for a few months now - I am determined to finish it (before I shuffle off...), but I think this is the longest it has ever taken me to finish any book. Now it's really just sheer bloody-mindedness that makes me want to get through it. So Onions isn't much good then, except for his most famous one? I just spent 2 days plowing through "The Dead of Night". I only read about 4 or 5 but found them really really long & hard going, including "The Beckoning Fair One" which I'd never bothered with before. As the good Dr. wrote, "just sheer bloody-mindedness" made me read any of them. Perhaps like Dem wading through "The People's Ghost Stories"
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Post by weirdmonger on Dec 5, 2021 17:10:37 GMT
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Post by helrunar on Dec 5, 2021 17:34:20 GMT
That's really a different way of looking at "The Beckoning Fair One," Weirdmonger. I tried to quote your final paragraph here but seemed unable to do that.
I attempted to read "The Beckoning Fair One" a really long time ago but couldn't get on with it. I remember the writing being really dull. I believe the central idea has been incorporated into other works--for one, the film Night of Dark Shadows seems to have been based upon it--most likely upon a TV adaptation (there was a fairly interesting one in 1968, in Hammer's TV series Journey to the Unknown).
H.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Dec 5, 2021 19:50:32 GMT
I believe the central idea has been incorporated into other works--for one, the film Night of Dark Shadows seems to have been based upon it--most likely upon a TV adaptation (there was a fairly interesting one in 1968, in Hammer's TV series Journey to the Unknown). There is also Elio Petri's UN TRANQUILLO POSTO DI CAMPAGNA (1968), starring Franco Nero. Edit: And of course it turns out I already mentioned this film, eleven years ago, in this thread.
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david
Crab On The Rampage
Posts: 45
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Post by david on Dec 6, 2021 11:27:56 GMT
I read Widdershins many years ago, and I can't recall a single detail about it. It clearly did not make a deep impression. I lent it to my father when I was done. For the rest of his life he joked about how he just didn't get it.
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Post by Jojo Lapin X on Jul 19, 2022 20:18:41 GMT
I always thought it bizarre that the De Angelis brothers choose this name as a pseudonym for their music. When I read the name Oliver Onions I think first of Bud Spencer and Sandokan and not of the writer. Nobody in my group back then knew Onions the writer. But millions knew Oliver Onions the musicians. Only in the mid-80s there were two books with stories and maybe novels, I don't know, translated as mass market paperbacks, in an imprint of classic phantastica.
I have to confess that I never read one of his stories.
"The Beckoning Fair One" is in GREAT TALES OF TERROR AND THE SUPERNATURAL, widely available since forever, and that is where I first encountered it.
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Post by Dr Strange on Jul 20, 2022 0:56:38 GMT
Short (23 min) film version of The Beckoning Fair One made in 2021 for Bradford Council's (unsuccessful) UK City of Culture bid. The Vimeo site where the video is hosted also claims that The Beckoning Fair One was the inspiration for Stephen King's The Shining, which I suppose could be true - a struggling author moves into a supposedly empty building to try to get on with his writing, and is driven mad by the resident ghost(s). Or maybe it is more that the makers of this film were influenced by Kubrick's take on the King story.
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Post by helrunar on Jul 20, 2022 1:11:57 GMT
I look forward to viewing that. There was a good adaptation of it in the Hammer studios television series Journey to the Unknown back circa 1968--the story was updated, of course.
H.
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Post by weirdmonger on Aug 17, 2022 15:12:59 GMT
Hell!! What is this?
TRAGIC CASEMENTS by Oliver Onions
This so-called ghost story — as sort-of-Joycean prose, but somehow more osmotically absorbable than Joyce — is its own mentioned “decalcomania” upon the surface whence it is read then onto the surface of the mind itself, and the meaning is between the two, creating ‘ghosts’ more powerfully than a more normal linearity of prose or than carefully built-up characters and plot…
Panes of glass in a glasshouse and faces upon them, and a half-shilling moon, and much else that crowds the page. Full of words I need to look up, and perhaps I shall if I read it again, but a first time reading is often the best one, and I managed to follow the outset where Patricia is staying with Anne and her mother and father, the two girls sleeping in the garden hut, her father having just built a greenhouse, a place visited by tinkers and tourists and whatever, Patricia four years older than Anne and engaged to Anne’s brother Denzil who later turns up suddenly on leave from the war, with all manner of (“mi5”) innuendo and wireless-tuning — and field-glasses that look for their owner. Possibly the only ghost story that truly works beyond fiction into an area that is something quite different. A “caggermagger of centuries ago.” Where has this story been all my life?
Those sash or slash windows or with vertical hinges? A tragic synchronicity of casements seen clearly from within or from without — or simply through, like filters working both ways? Somehow needing to be sorted out. Not sure it has been … yet?
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Post by weirdmonger on Aug 18, 2022 8:56:44 GMT
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Post by weirdmonger on Aug 22, 2022 13:22:44 GMT
My review of THE ROPE IN THE RAFTERS here: dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2022/08/22/the-rope-in-the-rafters-1935-by-oliver-onions/“And what of the multitude who will believe anything if only the lie is big and noisy enough? Who cling to their leaders who prepared the evil, and saw the evil through, and made a worse evil to follow it, and are even now tired and helpless before an evil by the side of which the other would be good?” — Oliver Onions, from THE ROPE IN THE RAFTERS (1935)
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Post by helrunar on Aug 22, 2022 14:54:37 GMT
Great quote. I didn't know Onions wrote about Republican voters. LOL!
H.
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Post by weirdmonger on Aug 22, 2022 15:08:15 GMT
Great quote. I didn't know Onions wrote about Republican voters. LOL! H. Or British conservative ones!
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