At the Lighthouse

As I have revealed before, I am an absolute sucker for urban legends, and I’ve spent more time than I care to think about on the excellent Snopes Urban Legend Reference Page.

I’m simply fascinated that there’s a literary genre out there with a composition so strong and effective that it can flourish despite being completely stripped off such refinement as imagery and metrics. Plus, as a Comparative Literature major it’s hard for me not to be enthusiastic about the fact that man is obviously so dependant on fiction that he’s ready to believe anything or to make up lies about the most obscure things.

For anyone out there as fascinated as me by the genre I recommend this book:

The Big Book of Urban Legends by Jan Hrold Brunwald. The book graphic collection of short stories and features 217 pages of comic strip-recounts of classic urban legends, created by a vast number of different comic strip artists.

Jan Harold Brunvand has been in charce of the selection of urban legends, and he’s quite the expert on the subject, having previously released too books about urban legends; The Vanishing Hitchhiker and The Choking Doberman. His expertise shows in the edition; all the selected urban legends are wonderfully juicy, and ingeniously, Brunvand has made the book more easily accesible by dividing the stories into eight different chapters, ranging from “Comic Calamities” about the tragi-comic, via “Caught in the Act” about sex-and-scandal urban legends, to “Campfire Classics” featuring those horror stories we all heard and believed during summer camp as kids. My favourite category is definitely the horror one, for the simple reason that I like torturing myself with terrible stories about dorm girls who wake up in the morning to find that their room mate has been slaughtered or parents who accidentally leave their baby to starve to death in a high chair as they go away on a holiday.

The idea of presenting the urban legends as comic strips works beautifully, as it lends to these popular story a very appropriate Roy-Lichtenstein-ish pop-art kind of look.

Check it out! But I speak from experience when I advise you not to read the book too close to your bedtime if you happen to be an impressionable person such as myself. The comic drawings do serve to disarm the horror of the stories somewhat (because no artist can compete with the gore you’re able to envision yourself), but the horror, it is still very much there.

/marie