Widdershins: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

Widdershins, credited to Oliver Onions, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of Widdershins by Oliver Onions. Read by Don W. Jenkins 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 sufferer'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. (Introduction from Wikipedia)

Recording facts

• Recording title: Widdershins
• Author credits: Oliver Onions
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 12
• Listed recording duration: 7:35:22

Catalogue topics

• horror, ghost stories

Track guide

1. 01 -- Section 01, The Beckoning Fair One, Parts I-IV — 42:45
2. 02 -- Section 02, The Beckoning Fair One, Parts V-VIII — 48:25
3. 03 -- Section 03, The Beckoning Fair One, Parts IX-XII — 54:28
4. 04 -- Section 04, Phantas — 35:51
5. 05 -- Section 05, Rooum — 31:00
6. 06 -- Section 06, Benlian — 39:29
7. 07 -- Section 07, Io — 32:44
8. 08 -- Section 08, The Accident — 33:04
9. 09 -- Section 09, The Cigarette Case — 29:00
10. 10 -- Section 10, The Rocker — 23:44
11. 11 -- Section 11, Hic Jacet, Introduction-Part III — 45:33
12. 12 -- Section 12, Hic Jacet, Parts IV-VI — 39:26

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.