The owner of a haunted country inn contends with death, fatherhood, romantic woes, and alcoholism in this humorous and “rattling good ghost story” from a Booker Prize–winning author ( The New York Times ) But its inspiration, a literary myth, DID help. Enormously. And this ancient story about another green man proved to illustrate the trajectory of my later life, when I had finally learned to bend in compassion. A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact. Well, the odd thing is that both these people were murdered all right, half torn to pieces, in fact, in the most brutal way, but in both cases the bodies were found in the open, at almost the same spot on the road to the village, although the murders were six years apart, and on both occasions it was established beyond doubt that Underhill was indoors here at the time. The obvious guess is that he hired chaps to do the job for him, but they were never caught, nobody even saw them, and the force used on the victims, they say, was disproportionate for an ordinary commercial killing.””

The first level of horror is his behavior. Very early in the story his father dies and in the week following that death, he initiates an affair with his best friend’s wife and then proposes and carries out a 3-way with that woman and his wife.

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Maurice Allington has reached middle age and is haunted by death. 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. It’s a pretty arresting thought.” He also happens to own and run a country inn that is haunted. 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. The King's English: A Guide to Modern Usage (name in part a pun as he was sometimes called "Kingers" or "The King" by friends and family, as told by his son Martin in his memoir Experience)

Kingsley Amis in the Great Tradition and in Our Time," by Robert H. Bell, Williams College. Introduction to Critical Essays on Kingsley Amis, ed. Robert H. Bell, New York: G.K. Hall, 1998. The last stages of the conversation were lengthened by my guest's habit of pausing frequently in search of some even more roundabout way of expressing himself than the one which had occurred first to him.'The discovery of Underhill’s power brings Maurice to a deeper consideration of the question of survival after death and prepares him for a conversation with still another supernatural agent, of quite a different kind from Underhill. Amis personifies God as a character in his own right, in the guise of a young man who expresses puzzlement and a certain degree of helplessness over the events unfolding in the world of his creation. Maurice’s transformation from an alienated man to an unwitting hero who chooses to take on the responsibilities of an absentee God forms the dramatic core of the novel. The ‘threesome’ between Maurice, his wife Juliet and his best friend’s wife Diana may be the most infamous scene in the book, but bear in mind the other goings-on, such as desecrating Underhill’s grave and the chinwag with a ghostly character clearly meant to represent God. Michael Barber (Winter 1975). "Kingsley Amis, The Art of Fiction No. 59". The Paris Review. Winter 1975 (64). The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". The Times. ISSN 0140-0460 . Retrieved 26 September 2020.