Lancelot’s dalliance with Queen Guinevere and
later Mordred’s betrayal of Arthur are much more
complex and disturbing themes. White remains
fairly true to Malory’s version although he intro-
duces occasional anachronisms, in part because of
the portrayal of Merlin as a man who lives back-
ward through time and therefore knows the future.
The tragic ending is perhaps meant to be a reflec-
tion of Britain’s loss of its ancient innocence and
despite the implications in the title that Arthur
might one day return, there is no indication in the
closing chapters that this is possible. The Once and
Future Kingmay not be the best single book written
about King Arthur, but it is the standard against
which all others are compared.
Onions, Oliver(1873–1961)
The British writer Oliver Onions wrote contempo-
rary novels and thrillers in addition to ghost and
horror stories, of which the most famous is the
short novel THE BECKONING FAIR ONE(1911), one
of the best-known ghost stories of all time. It was
so good that it overshadowed the rest of his first
collection of horror stories, Widdershins (1911),
which also included “Rouum,” the story of a tal-
ented man chased by an unknown presence, “Ben-
lian,” in which an insane sculptor begins to merge
with his work, and “The Rocker,” which involves
the ghost of a child.
His second collection, Ghosts in Daylight
(1924), includes one of the earliest stories in which
a writer’s characters come to life and interact with
him, but “The Real People” runs too long, so that
the surprising developments are diluted. His third
and last collection is The Painted Face (1929),
whose title story deals at great length with reincar-
nation. “The Rosewood Door” is another effective
ghost story. Most of the contents of the three col-
lections were gathered together as The Collected
Ghost Stories of Oliver Onions(1935) and a slightly
different selection as Ghost Stories(2001).
His book-length fantastic fiction has not re-
mained popular, although some of it is quite inter-
esting and ahead of its time. Onions was
particularly sensitive to the psychological aspects
of horror and used it extensively in his characteri-
zation and mood setting. There is an enchanted
suit of clothing in A Certain Man(1931), a magic
coin that continually returns to its owner in A
Shilling to Spend(1965), and a man who experi-
ences a reversal of the aging process in The Tower
of Oblivion(1921). Although his reputation is sup-
ported primarily by The Beckoning Fair One, his
small output of supernatural stories continues to be
highly regarded.“On the Far Side of the Cadillac Desert
with the Dead Folks”Joe R. Lansdale(1989)
In 1989 the writing team of John SKIPPand Craig
SPECTORdecided to edit an anthology of stories set
in the world of George Romero’s Living Dead
movies, where the dead rise as mindless zombies be-
cause of a mysterious and incurable disease. The
premise might have resulted in monotonous stories
of senseless violence, but the editors challenged
their writers to find something original and creative
to say, and none did it as well as Joe R. LANSDALE.
The initial shock is over and, as one might ex-
pect, people have become inured to the walking
dead. They hunt the more powerful males down
with rifles, but the women are often muzzled and
sold to clubs, where they dance naked in cages for
the amusement of the clientele. Civilization as we
know it has undergone some strange and never
fully explained transformation. Among other
things, there was a war between Chevrolet and
Cadillac, and the latter and their drivers are half-
buried in long rows in the desert separating the
wilds from Law Town, which is where the protago-
nist, a bounty hunter named Wayne, is bringing
Calhoun, a fugitive child killer, not that Wayne is a
model of decorum, either. He is not averse to kick-
ing his opponent when he is down and actually
prefers it that way.
On his way in with his prisoner, Wayne is way-
laid by a group of undead who act cooperatively,
contrary to anything in his experience, and coexist
with two unusual living people as well. They iden-
tify themselves as a small and very strange religious
order, and one of them claims to have been respon-
sible for the accident that unleashed the plague of
living death in the first place. As penance, he has
been recruiting and training some of the dead, con-
trolling them by means of brain implants. Calhoun264 Onions, Oliver