Too Good to Be True: The Colossal Book of Urban Legends

If a story sounds too good to be true, well, then it's probably an urban legend. Brunvand, the nation's leading authority on these contemporary folktales, draws from five previous collections (The Choking Doberman, Curses! Broiled Again!, etc.), from letters to his syndicated columns and from newspapers around the country, in this truly colossal anthology of horrendous and hilarious stories that sound as if they're true and most of the tellers believe are true, but somehow can never be verified. These are stories told by a FOAF (a friend of a friend) or a neighbor of the radio dispatcher who knows the deputy who talked to the doctor who treated 18 slash victims at the local mall. Many are familiar tales--of the hook heard rasping against the car door handle, of alligators in the sewers of New York, of earwigs in ears and spiders in bouffant hairdos--this last traced back to the 13th century. Everyone will find at least two or three stories they could have sworn really happened. These are stories that turn up in every region of the country, every walk of life, and that invariably involve laughing paramedics, a dead grandmother stashed on the luggage rack, a fantastically cheap price for a Porsche or an exorbitant one for a cookie recipe from Neiman Marcus--or is it Marshall Fields? In demonstrating how such stories spread, change and endure, and how certain kinds of stories attach themselves to certain franchises and products (""Kentucky Fried Rat"" is an especially gruesome example), Brunvand has constructed not only an entertaining anthology, but an excellent introduction to the study of folklore itself. (Aug.)