Kingsley Amis
(1922-1995)
Sir Kingsley Amis was born in London. In 1954 his first novel, ‘Lucky Jim’, burst onto the literary scene with extraordinary force, gaining him instant fame and notoriety as one of the most prominent of the so-called ‘angry young men’. He went on to write over twenty novels (winning the Booker Prize in 1986 for ‘The Old Devils’), and many volumes of poetry and non-fiction. He was knighted in 1991. His last novel, ‘The Biographer’s Moustache’, was published in September 1995.
The Green Man by Kingsley Amis
Kingsley Amis's sole horror novel, The Green Man, had long been on my list of "must read" books, for the simple reason that it has been highly recommended by three sources that I trust. British critic David Pringle chose it for inclusion in his overview volume Modern Fantasy: The 100 Best Novels, as did Michael Moorcock in Fantasy: The 100 Best Books AND Brian Aldiss in Horror: 100 Best Books. As it turns out, all of this praise is not misplaced, and Amis's 1969 novel of modern-day satire and the supernatural is as entertaining as can be.
The tale concerns a middle-aged man named Maurice Allington, who owns an inn called The Green Man in rural Hertfordshire, not far from Cambridge. Alli... Read More
More speculative fiction by Kingsley Amis
The Anti-Death League — (1966) Publisher: Brian Leonard, a Monty Python of secret agents, meets James Churchill, a young officer, at an English army base where preparations are under way for Operation Apollo. To complicate matters, Churchill has gone round-the-bend for a parole from the mental ward. Thrown amongst these loose cannons is a widowed beauty who practices “conspicuous polyandry,” an unfocused psychiatrist, an unbelieving chaplain, and a charming alcoholic.
The Alteration — (1976) Publisher: In Kingsley Amis’s virtuoso foray into virtual history it is 1976 but the modern world is a medieval relic, frozen in intellectual and spiritual time ever since Martin Luther was promoted to pope back in the sixteenth century. Stephen the Third, the king of England, has just died, and Mass (Mozart’s second requiem) is about to be sung to lay him to rest. In the choir is our hero, Hubert Anvil, an extremely ordinary ten-year-old boy with a faultless voice. In the audience is a select group of experts whose job is to determine whether that faultless voice should be preserved by performing a certain operation. Art, after all, is worth any sacrifice. How Hubert realizes what lies in store for him and how he deals with the whirlpool of piety, menace, terror, and passion that he soon finds himself in are the subject of a classic piece of counterfactual fiction equal to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. The Alteration won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for best science-fiction novel in 1976.
