Like many of the narrators on this List, Maurice is not especially sympathetic. All this while conveniently ignoring the presence of his thirteen-year-old TV-addict daughter, Amy, and assuming that any trouble which he might be having with Joyce can be easily solved with the help of more alcohol and sex. He begins the novel spending most of his time drinking like a fish and – in his occasional moments of sobriety – trying to convince his wife, Joyce, to get involved in a threesome with another woman, Diana (with whom he is having an affair). Maurice Allington, the narrator of the novel, is the proprietor of an English country inn called The Green Man. Confused? Well, genre-hopping seems to be one of Amis’ fortes. The Green Man also includes a very funny, and I suspect realistic, description of a threesome, which is – like The Simpsons – enough to put me off ever trying one. Other ways to describe the novel include: sex comedy, anti-alcohol parable, religious encounter and, well, so British. That’s one way to describe The Green Man, which is the first Kingsley Amis novel that I have read. And just when you think I would have been old enough to handle it, I spent the nights after watching both Paranormal Activity and F unny Games (the latter still one of the more horrifying films I have ever seen) curled up in a sleeping bag in my parents’ room… Seriously.īut I continue to watch horror films and, on occasion, read ghost stories. I was never able to watch Nightmare on Elm Street because The Simpsons‘ parody was sufficiently frightening to put me off the original. Three consecutive birthday sleepovers were spent standing in front of a mirror with my friends, doggedly willing Bloody Mary to appear – and three consecutive nights-after-birthdays were spent petrified in my bed, hoping that she would not. I think I have always had a love-hate relationship with horror.

The Green Man by Kingsley Amis