Amis's hero drives off to his exhumations in a Volks wagen or that he can hear panel discussions on the telly in his daugh ter's room while apparitions drift past him on the stairway. In “The Green Man,” Kingsley Amis has written a thoroughly con temporary ghost story. 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.
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