100 Books I Keep Keeping... 34 Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid
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Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid: The Book of Scary Urban Legends by Jan Harald Brunvand (2004)
These are the nightmare fuel tales, folks :0
Jan Harald Brunvand, made urban legends - the collecting, the investigating, the collating and explaining - his life's work and probably became the expert on them along the way. I have six of his books, all of which demonstrate thoroughly and fascinating that a good story could travel damn far and fast by word of mouth long before the internet arrived. Many of the stories are sexy, funny, tacky, heartwarming, horrifying, 'eeewwww'-ish or just plain weird, but of course many of the most famous and most longlived were the scary ones, the ones that inspired a million slasher or crime B-movies and turned so many people of buying foreign bananas/carpets/clothes etc or KFC chicken or yucca plants :)
Which is what this book is about. It's distilled urban fright: most of the stories, to be fair, are in the other books which also have a more detailed examination of their history and variations, so probably are better from a social historian/folklorist/sociologist point of view. But I like the distilled versions of 'The Hook', 'The Spider in the Cacti', 'The Vanishing Hitchhiker', 'Bloody Mary', 'The Body in the Bed', 'The Baby-Roast', 'Rats in the Pizza'.... yep, this is the one I reach for when I shouldn't be reading something creepy late at night, but am going to anyway :)
(ps - and given that I've gotten several story ideas over the years from Brunvand, with a couple more in my bunny pile, I count reading his books as the most enjoyable type of research...")