The Ones That Got Away!
I've written about "urban legends"--those apocryphal little horror stories told around offices and break rooms, and now shared as "creepy pasta" on the wild, terror-filled domains of the Internet--for many, many years, publishing one book, Scary Urban Legends (Schiffer, 2010), as well as an unpublished sequel Scary Horror Legends, that I have, nonetheless, cannibalized, off and on, whenever the occasion arises. I'm pretty much enamored with the genre--the weird, dislocating, timeless anonymity, the "everyman" nature of the undeveloped narrative protagonists; the way it exposes the hideous truth lurking just below the surface of bourgeois, suburban American society. Each legend has about it a sense of BEWARE: THIS could happen to ME, YOU, ANYONE OF US. Each nightmare vignette reminds me of what Stephen King once wrote about a short story being like, "A kiss from a lover in the dark."