title: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid: The Book of Scary Urban Legends
author:  Jan Harold Brunvand 
description: Rum flavored by a dead man in the cask; black widow spiders nesting in beehive hairdos; womens intestines broiled by tanning booths; teenage couples menaced by men with hooks for hands: if these are the sorts of tales that thrill and chill you, this an anthology worth picking up. Folklorist Brunvand (The Vanishing Hitchhiker) assembles a creepy cornucopia of urban legends, organizing them by theme ("Chills Up Your Spine," "Accidents") and considering them in a surprisingly sedate manner. The result is a blend of "primary text" urban legends (transcribed from field interviews, collected from e-mails or reprinted from local newspapers) and more reflective introductions that consider the motifs and variations of each urban legend. Some tales are old chestnuts, familiar to anyone whos been to a camp or a slumber party in the past 50 years, but others indicate more contemporary fears: stories of vacationers waking in unfamiliar hotel rooms, groggy and minus a kidney, or rumors of sexual predators who purposefully spread HIV to their unsuspecting partners. Brunvand traces most of these legends to their roots and debunks some of the more widespread ones, but he never lets his skepticism dampen his enthusiasm for the stories themselves. <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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  Stephen King
  
   **THE ROAD VIRUS**
  
  HEADS NORTH
  
  Richard Kinnell wasn't frightened when he first saw the picture at the yard
  sale in Rosewood. He was fascinated by it, and he felt he'd had the good luck
  to find something which might be very special, but fright?
  
  No. It didn't occur to him until later ("not until it was too late," as he
  might have written in one of his own numbingly successful novels) that he had
  felt much the same way about certain illegal drugs as a young man. He had gone
  down to Boston to participate in a PEN/New England conference tided "The
  Threat of Popularity." You could count on PEN to come up with such subjects,
  Kinnell had found; it was actually sort of comforting. He drove the two
  hundred and sixty miles from Derry rather than flying because he'd come to a
  plot impasse on his latest book and wanted some quiet time to try to work it
  o