Introduction to
Urban Nightmares

Well . . . yes and no. There really was one lonely alligator in brief residence in the New York City sewer system (it had apparently fallen off a ship and was quickly dispatched), and it's fairly likely that someone out there thought microwaving a wet dog was a good idea. Legends rarely develop in a vacuum.

But the veracity of the tales isn't what makes them so popular. For these stories are part of the ever-expanding world of urban folklore, the body of tales, beliefs, and rhymes that are usually told by "a friend of a friend" as true, but which are composed by no one and known by everyone. An urban folktale generally has a modern setting (although, despite the name, it need not take place in a city), and usually features a plot that seems perfectly rational at first, but proves totally improbable on closer examination.

Some of these tales have ancient antecedents: versions of "The Hook," for instance, date back to the thirteenth century. Others are in a constant state of evolution: Editor Sherman has watched a generic tale of a woman in an ice cream parlor getting so rattled by seeing a celebrity that she puts the ice cream in her purse evolve within a few months so that the celebrity becomes actor Paul Newman. Like any oral tradition, urban folktales add more and more elaborate details with each retelling, sometimes due to faulty memory, sometimes to make the story more exciting (which is why these details often involve celebrities).

With this anthology, we add yet another layer, to wit, a story that uses the folktale as a springboard. Urban Nightmares, like many anthologies before it, came to be at a science fiction convention, with a convivial group of writers that included Lawrence Watt-Evans, Christie Golden, Laura Anne Gilman, and the two editors (all of whom, you'll note, have stories herein). The topic turned to urban folktales and the story possibilities behind them. Then someone (we're not really sure who) said, "This should be an anthology!" The next thing we knew, we had one, full of enthusiastic authors, many of them Hugo- and Nebula-Award winners, who loved the idea of taking their favorite urban legends-whether they be ones that frightened them as children or amused them as adults-and making new stories out of them.

And so they have, ranging from ancient stories gussied up for modern times to new twists on urban folktales we've heard many times before to new legends that have sprung up thanks to the Internet. We're sure you'll find them both disturbingly different and eerily familiar.

Happy reading.

And . . . pleasant dreams.

Originally printed in Urban Nightmares, published in 1997 by Baen Books, and presently available at finer bookstores and online through Amazon.com. Copyright © 1997 Josepha Sherman & Keith R.A. DeCandido.

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