THE GREEN MAN

The Green Man is an English country pub run by a typical Kingsley Amis progatonist, 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 truck 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. B.G. (c) AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine [Published: DEC/ JAN 02]