The Green Man

The Green Man by Kingsley Amis

The Green Man is an English country pub run by a smart, ironical alcoholic philanderer named Maurice Allingham. The pub is haunted by a wicked seventeenth-century scholar and murderer in the Faustian mode named Thomas Underhill. In his dealings with the supernatural dark side, Underhill also raised an evil spirit of the forest apparently made of tree parts, known as The Green Man, who rises again when Allingham tries to sort out the skeletons in his closets. Amis in gothic mode is very entertaining, if not very believable, and Steven Pacey does a deft and fluent job of bringing this lively tale to life. Not a horror novel in the traditional sense of the term, but instead a rather quiet, brooding examination of the nature of evil and moral choice. Philosophical and at times rather funny, The Green Man should be of especial interest to those readers who normally shy away from the horror genre.