The Green Man

Horror · Dark comedy · Gothic

First published: 1920
Print length: 252 pagesHarcourt, Brace & World, 1970

Description

Kingsley Amis’s The Green Man follows an alcoholic English innkeeper whose routines include pursuing female guests and entertaining visitors with local ghost legends. What begins as familiar folklore changes after he encounters a spirit. He and his associates then discover that the rumored ghosts are real and that the threat they pose is immediate. The novel places a deeply flawed protagonist in circumstances he can no longer dismiss as entertainment, bringing his appetites and distractions into contact with genuine supernatural danger. Its central tension lies in whether an innkeeper accustomed to telling ghost stories can respond when those stories become part of his own life.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Atmospheric · Dense · Witty

Pace

Moderate

Tone

Dark · Eerie · Humorous · Irreverent

Structure

Linear

Focus

Atmosphere · Character · Plot

Emotional intensity

4 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 3 / 5
Ideas: 3 / 5
Structure: 3 / 5
Background knowledge: 1 / 5

Themes

AddictionGuiltMoralityMortalitySexuality

About Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis (1922–1995) was an English novelist, poet, critic and teacher whose long career combined social comedy with a sustained interest in genre fiction. He wrote more than twenty novels as well as poetry, memoir, stories, scripts and criticism. Lucky Jim (1953), one of the earliest British campus novels, made academic pretension and professional insecurity the basis of direct, farcical comedy and helped set a pattern for later campus fiction. Amis kept returning to vanity, compromised relationships and the pressures of institutions, but he did so in markedly different forms. The Green Man joins a flawed innkeeper’s appetites to a supernatural threat, while The Alteration places a threatened child chorister under an authoritarian church in an alternate England. In The Old Devils (1986), he brought that social attention to aging friends whose drinking, marriages and arguments about Wales expose old grievances.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Harcourt, Brace & World
Language: English
ISBN: 9780151370405

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