St Patricks Day

A while ago I posted about a fairly decent british sci-fi book, The Death of Grass, written by recently re-trendified John Christopher in the 1950's. Obviously things went down hill after that point, as I've just been reading about one of his later works, which must surely have one of the best pieces of cover art ever:


Nazi leprechauns? Could there honestly be a more terrifying premise?

Here's a brief plot synopsis from the website The Groovy Age of Horror:

Bridget Chauncey turns an Irish castle she inherits into a hotel. Her first guests are a bickering American couple with a nymphomaniac daughter; a German couple, he descended from pure Aryan Nazis and she a Jewess who lost her whole family in the Holocaust; the handsome alcoholic Irish soliciter who is not-so-secretly in love with Bridget; and the snooty English soliciter to whom she's engaged.

A few strange happenings quickly have this bunch talking about legends of the "little people" around the dinner table. Amazingly, a half-joking late-night vigil actually results in contact with the green-clad wee-folk. But there are also journals and boxes of files in the cellars--and they're written in German.

These little people, it turns out, aren't the supernatural creatures of Irish lore, but rather Jewish victims of Nazi experiments....