![]() ![]() The Green Man is a ghost story that hits a live nerve, a very black comedy with an uncannily happy ending: in other words, Kingsley Amis at his best. Maurice’s problems are many and increasing: How to deal with his own declining health? How to reach out to a teenage daughter who watches TV all the time? How to get his best friend’s wife in the sack? How to find another drink? (And another.) And then there is always death. ![]() The Green Man opens as Maurice’s father drops dead (had he seen something in the room?) and continues as friends and family convene for the funeral. ![]() It’s a pretty arresting thought.” He also happens to own and run a country inn that is haunted. As he says, “I honestly can’t see why everybody who isn’t a child, everybody who’s theoretically old enough to have understood what death means, doesn’t spend all his time thinking about it. The Green Man was chosen by David Pringle for inclusion in his volume Modern Fantasy: 100 Best Novels (Grafton Books), as well as for James Cawthorne & Michael Moorcock’s Fantasy: The 100 Best Books (Carroll & Graf), and in Kim Newman & Stephen Jones’s Horror: 100 Best Books (Carroll & Graf). The local sexton had refused to dig Underhill's grave. ![]() Thomas Underhill, the seventeenth-century scholar rumored to have killed his wife. His pub is inhabited by the spirit of Dr. Maurice Allington has reached middle age and is haunted by death. Maurice Allington is a worldly but haunted publican. The owner of a haunted country inn contends with death, fatherhood, romantic woes, and alcoholism in this humorous, “rattling good ghost story” from a Booker Prize–winning author ( The New York Times ) ![]()
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