Watkins Publishing, a venerable U.K. publishing house with a long history in esoteric writing, is developing a new line of books: their "Watkins Book of..." series, meant (as far as I can infer from soon-to-be 3 entries) to collect examples of the proposed subject without very much in the way of connective tissue. Case in point, the 2024 Watkins Book of Urban Legends, a collection of those stories that are not quite fairy tales and not quite ghost stories but can be a little of both. Gail de Vos certainly has the time served, so to speak, to shepherd such a book; she's been publishing for more than 20 years almost exclusively in variants of "collecting tales of <x> sort for <y> audience." If she wasn't soliciting this book to publishers, she probably would be the candidate Watkins would reach out to if it was their idea first. We have the topic and we have a well-suited author, overseen by a reputable publisher in the appropriate fields of interest. The ground well and truly laid, we are simply left to decide how it all paid off - how's the book?
The Watkins Book of Urban Legends is a fine addition to your library so long as you understand what it is and is not. Despite the occasional personal commentary from the author, this is a reference book. de Vos will mention that she referenced the songs "My Way" and "Gloomy Sunday" in a previous book, or that her own bout with cancer led to a specific line of inquiry, but in no serious way could it be said that she has written a memoir. Neither has she tried to draw larger conclusions about urban legends or used them to support a particular thesis about the nature of the world. Which is all fine! A good collection of urban legends has a value in and of itself, and this is, in many cases, a very good collection. The collection is broad enough that you're going to recognize, or even remember from your own life, a number of them. That will probably be a different list for each reader, though, and with 200+ meaty pages the odds are that the question in your mind right about now, "yeah, but I wonder if she knows about THIS one?" is most likely "yes, and she tells you how it was first published by Dear Abby in the 60's." Covering as much ground as this book does (there are sections on conspiracy theories, health scare, ghosts and haunting, and more) the tone can shift from benign, even silly, to dawning horror that the consequences of these apocryphal tales are sometimes very real. Need I say more than "COVID" to remind you of numerous stories that impacted people's critical health decisions?
We don't do "x number of stars" reviews on Facing North, but if there was some kind of scoring system here, the only minor deduction would be that the effort put into tracking down these stories varies wildly. Or, to be fair, it may be that strenuous efforts on de Vos's part sometimes yielded paltry results. Nevertheless, after getting 5+ pages on bridges haunted by crying babies, including numerous anecdotes from throughout the years, you can get really excited by the prospect of, for example, haunted statues, only to find one or two paragraphs for those. Again, this may have been absolutely out of the author's control, but it could still leave me feeling a little let down and it does seem that you can deduce which subjects most interested the author sometimes. But this is a small thing. That's no reason not to dive into The Watkins Book of Urban Legends if these sorts of stories are of any interest to you at all.
~review by Wanderer
Author: Gail de Vos
Watkins Publishing, 2024
320 pp. Hardcover $19.95 USD
