As a big fan of urban legends I have to say Gail De Vos’s The Watkins Book of Urban Legends was a blast, even if it wasn’t exactly what I was expecting. And I mean that in a good way. This book was loaded with so much more information than I expected. Heck given how in-depth the analysis is of these legends it almost feels like a textbook for a college class on urban legends. Definitely recommend this one for anyone with an interest in urban legends. Thanks so much to Watkins Publishing and NetGalley for the ARC.

I have always been fascinated by Urban Legends, everything about them is alluring to me. I went into this book wondering how many of them I’d know. There were surprisingly a lot that I didn’t. I devoured this book over a couple of days and was sad when it came to an end. Definitely pick up this book if you get a chance!

I was really looking forward to this but found the writing style and organisation very off putting, the whole thing felt very cut and pasted without any real flow to it

Not for me at all got 25% in then DNFd

Unfortunately, this was a DNF for me at 36%. I loved the concept, and there was a great variety of urban legends in this book, but the structure and writing style just didn’t work for me. It wasn’t always clear what part of the chapter was the legend, and what part was the authors commentary on it. Sometimes portions of the urban legend seemed to be just copied and pasted from the internet, which made it confusing to read.

really fun and interesting look at a whole bunch of urban legends, organised into categories, with the author's own experiences threaded throughout. i recognised some f them while others were completely new to me and so interesting, especially different cultures

A mishmash compendium of urban legends, (dis)organized as they are because that's how the author thought of them. Unfortunately the formatting and text surrounding the legends themselves is poorly done, making this a hassle to parse. I'd have liked more information on the legends and their variants than the author's personal anecdotes about telling or hearing the stories. Possibly useful or enjoyable for kids and storytellers.

I really tried to get into this book, as I love a good spooky story or urban legend, but I found this just isn't a book for casual reading, it's very much more of an academic book, maybe for someone in a college course looking for more information of the origins of stories, as it contains some source citing.
The story retellings themselves were dull and lacklustre. Not worth reading in my opinion. It might find an audience somewhere, but definitely not with me.

I enjoyed this book of urban legends. Some of them were familiar to me, others were new. The author did a good job explaining the backstory of these legends.

Thank you to NetGalley and Watkins Publishing for an eARC copy of The Watkins Book of Urban Legends.

I love reading and learning about urban legends, and I am a full on believer of a lot of them. But, this particular book throws a lot of information and it reminds me of a textbook rather than a collection. I would have liked it more if it had more of a collection feel.

Not your everyday book of urban legends, Gail DeVos provides history and local customs that lend an extra sense of how the legends came to be. The legends are from various segments of the world and give a small snapshot of life outside the normal. Whether an old legend or a contemporary tale, every one of them will leave readers looking for another story. 5 easy stars.

This is a fun read but I honestly don’t think this is a book that you decide to read from start to finish. I feel like it’s one where you read a chapter here and a chapter there, if that makes sense? I love how there’s a section of stories that are appropriate for even younger readers. I was able to read a few of the urban legends to my almost 9 year old and I loved getting to include her!! I do agree with a few other reviews that there’s a lotttt of information packed into each chapter, which sometimes was really hard for me to stay focused at times. All in all I enjoyed it!

Gail De Vos' "The Watkins Book of Urban Legends" was a fun read that was well written and well researched. I really enjoyed the variety of urban legends from around the world and the history behind them.

My complaint about it was that sometimes I became overwhelmed at how much information was shoved into chapters. That's not a BAD thing necessarily, but as a reader, I had to read it in shorter spurts or I'd get burned out quickly.

This is definitely a great resource material for any fans of things that are seriously strange. I want to thank Netgalley for a copy of this book, and if you're interested in urban legends-- you can buy it in November of 2024!

I was not able to complete this book. I found the topic very interesting. but the delivery felt lacking. I was hoping this would be a collection of some of the most common legends and stories. This book is more a collection of the history urban legends. It seemed to be well researched, but I found reading it to be dry. Some of that might be due to my expectations. I thought it would be fiction with a bit of explanation, but it is largely explanation with a basic rundown of the story. Also, I wasn't quite following the organization. There were not really chapter breaks. So campfire stories blended in with scams and chain emails. Overall an interesting topic, just not what I was looking for.

I loved this book. I love collections of stories and this was perfect plus I grew up with the "Urban Legend" movies of the 90s & 20s so I was the perfect audience. I do with it was more connected like the movies were like a whole story woven in between the legends but this book was amazing either way. I give it 4.5 stars

Oh I love this so much. The cover was creepy and the stories was phenomenal!! I absolutely adored this collection!

Thank you NetGalley and publisher for this arc!

What a good book!!! Such a great writing style. This was my first by this author and will not be my last! I lived all of the different stories!

As someone who does not believe in any urban legends, and has not kept up-to-date about them except for a few popular ones, reading a compilation of urban legends to use as inspiration would be sufficient for me, and yet this book offers more! The author - fortunately - informs us about the origins, the histories of these legends and adapts/retells the legends. Double inspiration!
4.5 stars

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me to read this ARC. The views expressed in this review are voluntary and my own.

I think I was expecting this book to be more of an anthology, in the vein of "Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark", with some additional notes and history about each legend. However, it reads more like a textbook, often with sections of analysis longer than the actual legend.

Personally, I wanted to be immersed in the stories, let myself get a little creeped out and nostalgic, and learn a bit about the ones I found most intriguing, but the format (at least on Kindle) is so lumped together that skimming is not really an easy option. The legends are also told in a very straightforward format, not embellished to be "stories". This book is more for educational than entertainment purposes.

Still, for what it is, this is a very interesting read, and is clearly a passion project dear to the author's heart. The collection of legends in here is very large, and a lot of effort and detail has gone into the research behind each tale. It was fun to read some legends I'd never heard of before as well.

This book is seriously fascinating! It's like this mega collection of urban legends from all over the globe, plus conspiracy theories and all that juicy stuff. Gail De Vos totally knows her stuff when it comes to these tales, and she dives deep into their origins and how they've evolved, especially in the age of social media.

I was totally hooked by how she connects these stories to our modern lives, like how the internet has totally changed how these legends spread. It's not just spooky tales—there's legit psychological and cultural insights packed in here. Plus, she covers everything from haunted paintings to creepy conspiracy theories.

While I loved diving into all these stories, I gotta say, it's a lot to take in at once. I found myself needing breaks to process all the info jammed into each chapter. Still, if you're into paranormal mysteries or just love a good spooky tale, this book is a gold mine.

Book: The Watkins Book of Urban Legends
Author: Gail de Vos
Publisher: Watkins Publishing
ISBN: 9781786788559
Expected Publication: 12 November 2024
Capone’s Rating: 3 of 5⭐

You may see three of five stars and may assume I’m trying to discourage readers from picking up this volume. I am not. It’s a good book, but it has some glaring flaws that do it a disservice. But ignoring the book would be a disservice to you as a collector of modern myths and legends or as a horror reader or writer aiming to broaden your knowledge base. Folks in any of these situations would do themselves a favor by reading The Watkins Book of Urban Legends.

In this manuscript, Gail de Vos has grouped urban legends, myths, and false beliefs into broad categories (e.g. haunted places, common medical misconceptions, specific haunts not tied to particular places, etc.). The collection is pretty large—are there eighty stories in here? A hundred? A lot, in any case.

Some challenging aspects of de Vos’s approach will challenge any curious reader: is the author offering her best attempt at a true accounting of a rumor? or a true accounting of the common accounting of that rumor? Is the author trying to help us choose correctly morally in retelling others’ tales? Is she trying to correct common misconceptions of popular beliefs? The trouble is, there’s no particular focus here, and it’s sometimes tough to distinguish what thing among these the author is doing in a given section. Is the author offering us what she believes is the true story behind a tale folks have been retelling for ages—its origin? Or is she merely reporting one frequently told variant of the story? It's a challenge to distinguish what goal is being served by which section of text, and sometimes it seems to flip from one purpose to another from one brief tale to the next.

I’m reading an advanced reader copy of this text, and I really hope the editors get it together with the typos, missing words, and poorly phrased sentences. If they let it fly as is, the author—who by and large does an excellent job with this sort of thing—will be badly represented. While dreaming of things I wish were true, I also believe the book would be much better if written by one more accustomed to writing stories as opposed to telling them aloud to audiences in face-to-face scenarios. The word choices, pacing of telling, and written story construction generally is problematic throughout the volume. A writer focused more on craft would provide—well, a better written telling of those tales.

Another odd choice that I hope the publishers catch in a new phase of developmental editing is the decision to include medical misconstruals and myths. Including the section highlights people’s mistaken beliefs about medical practices and pharmacological truths, thereby stretching the notion of popular legends to the point of meaninglessness—any common confusion at all would qualify for inclusion in this volume, if this working definition holds. This section really ought to be dropped from the text in revision.

These challenges aside, I’m glad the author has chosen to collect these stories and offers them to the public domain for retooling and retelling, and I’m glad the publisher is releasing this collection. A lot of us out there in storyland would do well to read it. Three stars.