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Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid: The Book of Scary Urban Legends. By Jan Harold Brunvand. (New York: Norton, 2004. Pp. 256, introduction, illustrations. $13.95 paper)
Jan Brunvand 's latest volume brings to ten the number of collections of urban legends he has published, beginning with The Vanishing Hitchhiker in 1981-an impressive number, reflecting a lifelong interest in the genre. What distinguishes the present volume from the others is that here Brunvand draws on literary sources in addition to his own extensive files. In that alone, he has provided an important contribution to the study of contemporary legendry. Who else would have thought to include a passage from Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year?
Brunvand's publishing career predates his first legend collection by 20 years, but his name as a folklorist is most strongly associated with urban legends, a term often attributed to him but apparently first used by his mentor, Richard M. Dorson (1968). Brunvand's works are very popular: all his collections are in print (1981, 1984, 1986, 1989, 1993, 1999, 2001; Fleming and Boyd 1994), as are his college textbook The Study of American Folklore (1998 [1968]), his Readings in American Folklore (1979); and his American Folklore: an Encyclopedia (1996). Brunvand's contribution to folklore scholarship has a solid foundation particularly in these last three, as well as in his more recent study of the decoration of houses in rural Romania (2003). His 1961 Indiana University doctoral dissertation comparing oral and literary versions of A-T 901, The Taming of the Shrew (1991), gives evidence of his long-standing interest in the structure, morphology, and typology of the folktale. But his anthologizing of urban legendry seems to have proved the most rewarding venture in several respects (even perhaps something of a cottage industry). Early on in his collecting and publishing of urban legends, Brunvand's focus seemed divided between teasing out the hidden meanings of legends (1981) and demonstrating that legends' multiple variants, ubiquity, and internal clues such as various "authenticating devices," to use Gillian Bennett's term (1988a:2), were evidence of their falsity. In order to debunk legends he drew on the analytical methods for identifying what Elliott...