This soft drink tra dition runs from Ann Radcliffe to Abbott and Costello, and its basis, however solemn it may seem on the surface, is comic. Instead, it relies upon mere vice and ingenuity: maiden aunts, jealous husbands, dec adent nephews and greedy butlers groan in attics, shatter window panes and scrawl threats on parch ment in order to intimidate suscept ible victims. The watered down ghost story has neither true spirits nor genuine maniacs to recommend it. (A variant is the tale in which the ghost is brought out not by psychosis but, as in the case of Scrooge, by indigestion and a bad conscience.)īy Kingsley Amis. The makers of subtler and mellower blends tend, like Henry James, to introduce the mind into the con coction and leave the reader suspect ing that weird apparitions are the products of repressed psyches rather than of restless souls. The masters of the pure thing, like Poe and Sheridan Le Fanu, serve their spirits horrible and straight. Ghost stories usually come in one of three proofs: 100, 80, and watered down. It was in this garden that, fittingly, I first read Kingsley Amis’s novel The Green Man. As it is, it still has a public bar, a saloon bar, a snug and a small walled garden. I am not going to name the village, because the brewery will immediately swoop and render it intolerable. It is called The Green Man and is situated in a rural West Midlands village. There is at least one such place remaining. The best time is after two o’clock, when the lunchtimers have returned to work or afternoon telly. Any conversation should be infrequent and sotto voce, limited perhaps to the names of racehorses or someone who hasn’t been in lately because he died last week. It should have few customers, and these also quiet and dotted around the smallish bar at a fairly unsocial equidistance from each other. By reading I mean sitting alone in a corner of the pub with a pint of bitter and a good book, not the Good Book – that might attract unwelcome attention. I have always liked reading and pubs, and reading in pubs. Reviewed by William Palmer in Slightly Foxed Issue 20 A Visit from God Led by an anxious desire to vindicate his sanity, Allington strives to uncover the key to Underhill’s satanic powers, all while the skeletons in Allington’s own cupboard rattle to get out. However, the landlord, Maurice Allington, is the sole witness to the renaissance of the malevolent Underhill.
Like all good coaching inns, The Green Man is said to boast a resident ghost: Dr Thomas Underhill, a notorious seventeenth-century practitioner of black arts and sexual deviancy.
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