2004
256 pages
Reviews:
From Publishers Weekly
ron flavoured por a dead man in the cask; black widow spiders nesting in beehive hairdos; women’s intestines broiled por tanning booths; teenage couples menaced por men with hooks for hands: if these are the sorts of tales that thrill and chill you, this an anthology worth picking up. Folklorist Brunvand (The Vanishing Hitchhiker) assembles a creepy cornucopia of urban legends, organizing them por theme ("Chills Up Your Spine," "Accidents") and considering them in a surprisingly sedate manner. The result is a blend of "primary text" urban legends (transcribed from field interviews, collected from e-mails o reprinted from local newspapers) and más reflective introductions that consider the motifs and variations of each urban legend. Some tales are old chestnuts, familiar to anyone who’s been to a camp o a slumber party in the past 50 years, but others indicate más contemporary fears: stories of vacationers waking in unfamiliar hotel rooms, groggy and minus a kidney, o rumours of sexual predators who purposefully spread HIV to their unsuspecting partners. Brunvand traces most of these legends to their roots and debunks some of the más widespread ones, but he never lets his scepticism dampen his enthusiasm for the stories themselves.
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From School biblioteca Journal
Adult/High School–Brunvand is known to many as the godfather of the American urban legend. In this collection, he has compiled the scariest, grisliest ones–some that are unfamiliar but many that have been heard at sleepovers and depicted in horror cine over the past several years. Since many of them will be known to urban-legend lovers, the book's real strength is in the subtle changes within different versions of a legend. The runaway madman with the hook for a hand, the ghost of the dead girl, the slasher under the car o in the backseat all make appearances here, but in slightly different circumstances. Sometimes the distances are great, but the differences are few. For example, the "Hairy-Armed Hitchhiker" appears in two versions, one from England and one from Los Angeles. Brunvand also integrates how much the Internet, particularly e-mail, has changed the dissemination of urban legends. He gives credit to urban-legend debunking site www.snopes.com, and the final chapter concerns the widespread hysterical e-mails that purport to come from experts but actually originate from the usual dubious sources. All in all, this is a good addition where such titles are popular.
–Jamie Watson, Hartford County Public Library, MD
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