There are a lot of books on the paranormal that contain scholarly, objective descriptions of mysterious events.
This is not one of those books.
Suburban Legends by Sam Stall is a tongue-in-cheek look at ghosts, aliens, true-crime, and other weirdness that just happens to show up in the suburbs. It’s a quick, easy read, with every chapter standing on its own as a bite-sized urban legend.
The book never tries to take itself too seriously. You can practically hear the author take off his sunglasses with a dramatic flourish before the last line of every chapter. In telling about a haunted piece of clothing, Stall writes “But for one Illinois resident…terror came dressed in a windbreaker.”
Every time you think the book might be getting serious, Stall throws in a particularly good line. My favorite was when he discussed San Francisco landowners who intentionally built their home on top of a huge aboriginal grave site:
…this is what’s known in paranormal circles as “asking for it.”
The book is divided into seven sections; persistent ghosts, roadside oddities, creepy (and sometimes murderous) neighbors, animal plagues, dangerous women, buried corpses, and everything else that couldn’t fit into a category.
I admit, at first the section “Really Desperate Housewives” bothered me, as it gleefully tells stories of women who murdered their husbands and lovers. I thought it was a pretty misogynistic collection, until I flipped back to the section on creepy neighbors: almost every one of them were men. So I guess fair’s fair.
For all its quirkiness and the shortness of the chapters, the book is particularly well-researched. All the stores are (we’re told) completely true. This makes for an even more interesting read when you find events that most likely led to the movies and urban legends we know so well.
The chase scene in the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind was apparently based on a real-life chase in 1966, and a UFO sighting that ruined several people’s lives. The infamous wood-chipper scene in Fargo could very well be based on a 1975 murder in Connecticut. Fans of Supernatural will be happy to see the references to skinwalkers, spotted along the (now renamed) Route 666. And the chapter on the murders in a quiet Long Island neighborhood is that much creepier when you find out it’s the inspiration for one of the most famous horror movies of all time.
(No, I’m not going to tell you which one. It’d spoil the surprise.)
As the nights get longer, this is a fun book to curl up with. It may creep you out in places, but you’ll get a good laugh out of it too.