There's been some recent chatter online about what, if anything, H.P. Lovecraft thought about Oliver Onions' spectral work. The quick answer is: not much. Aside from a few passing mentions indicating an intent to read Onions, Lovecraft never had much to say about this weird fiction colleague.
The recent questions about Lovecraft's view on Onions stem from a citation on the back cover of Dover's 2004 Onions reprint, The Beckoning Fair One. The promotional summary states, "Acclaimed by such masters of the genre as Algernon Blackwood and H.P. Lovecraft as one of the best ghost stories in the English language, 'The Beckoning Fair One' is Oliver Onions' most fascinating and eminently readable story." Regrettably, it appears Dover failed to pull up an exact Lovecraft quote. If they had tried, they would have found that Lovecraft had little to say at all about Onions' ghost stories. It's not even completely clear if Lovecraft read enough tales by Onions to make a positive or negative judgment.
This is a case where Lovecraft's rocketing popularity is being used to nudge more obscure weird fiction writers higher. While it's easy to understand the marketing merits of doing this, it can have unintended consequences if not thoroughly researched, least of which is belittling fantastic supernatural works that are more than capable of standing on their own strengths. Oliver Onions is one such writer who shouldn't need praise from others, even the likes of HPL, to appear intriguing.
Mercifully, Wordsworth's new paperback, The Dead of Night: The Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions, which nearly collects Onions' full oeuvre, doesn't resort to erroneous recommendations by Lovecraft. It also contains a universe more than Dover's reprint, and is cheaper to boot.
-Grim Blogger
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