Reggie Oliver


Reggie Oliver is an English playwright, biographer and writer of ghost stories.

Life and career

Reggie Oliver was educated at Eton and University College, Oxford, and has been a professional playwright, actor, and theatre director since 1975.
He has worked in radio, television, films, and theatre, both in the West End and outside London. He was a founding member of the late Sir Anthony Quayle's Compass Theatre, and both played the part of Traverse and understudied Sir Anthony in the tour and West End run of The Clandestine Marriage in 1984.
His plays include Imaginary Lines, Absolution, Back Payments, Taking Liberties, Put Some Clothes On, Clarisse!, and Winner Takes All—the last described by Michael Billington as "the funniest evening in London" when it was revived at the Orange Tree Theatre in 2000. His play A Portrait of Two Artists was performed on Radio 3 in 1989.
Oliver's biography of his aunt Stella Gibbons, Out of the Woodshed, was published by Bloomsbury in 1998; and he is a contributor to the historical magazine History Today. He has written about ghost stories for such journals as Supernatural Tales, All Hallows, Wormwood for which he writes the regular Under Review column, and Weirdly Supernatural.
He lives in Suffolk and was married to the artist and actress Joanna Dunham until her death in 2014.

Horror fiction

Oliver's first horror story appeared in the journal Weirdly Supernatural under the Haunted River imprint. This was followed by Oliver's first two collections, The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini and The Complete Symphonies of Adolf Hitler, again under the Haunted River imprint. The former was nominated for an International Horror Guild Award and the latter short-listed by the Dracula Society for a Children of the Night award. Both books received favourable notices from reviewers in such small press magazines as Weird Tales and All Hallows.
In All Hallows 34, Jim Rockhill praised Oliver's The Dreams of Cardinal Vittorini, noting:

Oliver’s ability to create a sense of time and place in every one of these stories is exemplary.... As a work of spiritual terror it has few peers.... Thomas Ligotti and Matt Cardin are the only authors writing today who equal the assurance demonstrated by the author of this tale in ripping away the veil separating mundane reality from the shrieking abyss it conceals.

Ramsey Campbell has also written positively about the same work: "Oliver’s sharp eye for character and ear for dialogue never desert him.". In his introduction to The Folio Book of Horror Stories he wrote "I believe Reggie Oliver to be the greatest living British clacissist in our field who upholds its highest literary qualities."
His experiences in the worlds of academe, the Church of England, and the arts have all provided inspiration for his work. A number of his stories are set within the rather seedy end of show business, drawing on his background as a playwright, director and actor. Douglas Campbell wrote of one such story, "The Skins", "I find it hard to believe that there wasn't some kind of a dare involved when Oliver set out to write a tale about a haunted pantomime horse, but the story itself is an unforgettable piece, drawing to a grotesque and pathetic climax in a horribly plausible world of down-at-heel theatre folk."
He has pastiched a number of styles and authors, from Restoration comedy and 16th-century mystical texts to Oscar Wilde and M. R. James. A story in Arthur Machen's style resulted in his winning the Friends of Arthur Machen short story competition in 2005.
Oliver's work has appeared in over seventy anthologies, including Acquainted with the Night,Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, Best New Horror etc. He has acted as consultant on a project which has seen all of M. R. James's ghost stories released on CD.
In April 2010, Centipede Press published Oliver's collected short stories in a volume which features many new illustrations. He frequently illustrates his own work, and very occasionally that of others such as Anna Taborska and Susan Hill.

Publications

Plays

Numerous nominations for World Fantasy, British Fantasy, Stoker, International Horror Guild and Shirley Jackson awards