Horror I: 16 racconti dell'orrore

by Oliver Onions, H. Russell Wakefield, Fitz-James O'Brien

16 racconti dell'orrore di George Oliver Onions, H. Russell Wakefield, Carl Jacobi, Matthew Phipps Shiel, J. Ramsey Campbell, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, Fritz Leiber, William Hope Hodgson, John Pocsik, August Derleth, Fitz James O'Brien, William Wilkie Collins, Clark Ashton Smith, Frank Belknap Long, Robert Ervin Howard, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.


Da quando il romanzo Dracula di Bram Stoker e i film di Terence Fisher han contribuito in maniera determinante a far rinascere interesse per le storie fantastiche e del terrore, tale interesse non ha mai subito flessioni. Quel che i più ignorano è che il genere non solo non è nuovo, ma risale addirittura al Settecento e ha dato opere di buon livello letterario, alcune addirittura famose. Fu forse Bozena Nemcova a parlare per prima dei vampiri in un’opera letteraria, furono certi autori pre-romantici o romantici a trattare di delitti e di mostruosità (da Sade a Walpole, da Byron a Petrus Borel, da E. T. A. Hoffmann a Sacher Masoch e a Meyrink). Gran contributo al genere hanno poi dato le storie di fantasmi, di revenants, fiorite soprattutto nelle caligini d’Inghilterra (una, bellissima, The Turn of the Screw, la scrisse nientemeno che Henry James). Altre nuove ne sono state escogitate da scrittori appartenenti, per nascita o per cultura, al New England, negli Stati Uniti. Sembra esserci qualche connessione fra la mentalità nordica puritana e il pullulare degli spiriti inquieti (nella realtà o nella fantasia), intorno a certi luoghi, come ben dimostrano taluni racconti dello stesso Hawthorne. In questa antologia sono appunto raccolti sedici racconti di scrittori inglesi e americani, tutti aventi come tema l’orrore suscitato da creature o da situazioni di questo, di quell’altro e di altri mondi ancora. Racconti di autori noti e meno noti, che vanno dal grande Lovecraft ai giovanissimi Pocsik e Ramsey Campbell attraverso Onions e Hope Hodgson.

Genres: Horror

606 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

George Oliver Onions (1873–1961), who published under the name Oliver Onions, was an English writer of short stories and novels.

Oliver Onions was born in Bradford in 1873. Although he legally changed his name to George Oliver in 1918, he always published under the name Oliver Onions. Onions originally worked as a commercial artist before turning to writing, and the dust jackets of his earliest works included illustrations painted by Onions himself.

Onions was a prolific writer of short stories and novels and is best remembered today for his ghost stories, the most famous of which is probably ‘The Beckoning Fair One’, originally published in Widdershins (1911). Despite being known today chiefly for his supernatural short fiction, Onions also published more than a dozen novels in a variety of genres, including In Accordance with the Evidence (1912), The Tower of Oblivion (1921), The Hand of Kornelius Voyt (1939), The Story of Ragged Robyn (1945), and Poor Man's Tapestry (1946), which won the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize as the best work of fiction published that year.

Onions was apparently a very private individual, and though admired and well-respected in his time, he appears not to have moved in literary circles, and few personal memoirs of him survive. He spent most of his later life in Wales, where he lived with his wife, Berta Ruck (1878-1978), herself a prolific and popular novelist; they had two sons, Arthur (b. 1912) and William (b. 1913). Oliver Onions died in 1961.