Urban
Legends: they definitely happened to someone…
When I was a kid, I remember at the end of our
road there was a piece of rough ground called the spinney. It had trees and mud
and – bizarrely – carefully cut rectangular holes in the ground, which might
have been for laying pipes or cables, except for the fact that the place wasn’t
built on until decades later. Sometimes, though not all that often, we used to
go and play in the spinney. The reason we didn’t play there very frequently
(and never alone) was that it was well known amongst the kids that there was a killer in there. He’d killed
a child. Or maybe a body had been found in there. Or something. Anyway, the
spinney was scary.
That’s the thing about urban legends: you can
never quite pin them down. I remember when I was in my teens hearing the one
about the person who bit into a piece of battered chicken from a take-away and
found they were actually eating a rat that had fallen into the deep fat fryer. The
person who told me that one said they knew for a fact it was true, because it
had happened to their friend’s cousin. Or perhaps their friend’s cousin’s
boyfriend. Well, it had definitely happened to someone.
Gruesome, improbable and vague though they are,
I love urban legends. They’re the modern version of fairy tales. We’ve replaced
trolls, dragons and fairies with serial killers, vanishing hitchhikers and
psychopathic babysitters.
I’ve long been fascinated by legends and folk
tales. My first book, The Vanishing of
Katharina Linden, incorporated the genuine folk stories of Bad
Münstereifel, the German town where it is set. When I was writing my Forbidden Spaces trilogy, which is set
in the murky world of urbex (urban exploration), I wanted a grittier, more
modern equivalent. The final book, Urban
Legends, is called that because the telling of urban legends is woven into
the plot, just as local legends were woven into my previous books.
It wasn’t quite as simple as just picking out
my favourite urban legends. The Forbidden
Spaces trilogy is set in Belgium, partly in Brussels and partly in the
Dutch-speaking part of the country, Flanders. I wanted to make the environment
of the books as authentic as possible, so I spent a long time making sure that
the urban legends I retold in the book are known in Belgium. I also tried to
use ones that were known outside
Belgium too, because I think there is more resonance for British readers if
they recognise the stories.
The first urban legend that appears in the
book, the Angel Smile, is a very well-known and very nasty one. There’s a great
book by Stefaan Top of the University of Leuven which collects urban legends
from Flanders. That has a version of the Angel Smile in it. There’s a Japanese
variation on the same thing called Kuchisake-onna. The motif also appears in a number of
Hollywood films.That was the kind of story I was looking for – very wide spread
and genuinely chilling. I think the interesting thing about the version of the
Angel Smile legend that I’ve used in the book is that there is this terrible
element of choice in it. The victim has to choose between a known and horrible
fate or the Angel Smile, which may or may not be worse.
The impossible or dangerous choice is a very old plot device. You
see it in stories like The Lady or the
Tiger? where someone is put into an arena and has to choose between two
doors. One has a beautiful woman behind it but the other has a man-eating
tiger, and he has to choose one to open without knowing which is which. Stories
like these are about the fear of unknown danger and making a disastrous wrong
decision.
Ironically these are both things the characters in Urban Legends really should be worrying
about! In the book, urban explorers are disappearing and no-one knows who or
what is responsible, though there are plenty of nasty stories going around.
Whom can you trust? Make a wrong decision about that and you could be the next one to go…
There are also going to be some very tough choices for Veerle,
the heroine, and her on/off boyfriend Kris. They’ve had to make some terrible
decisions in the previous books (Silent
Saturday, Demons of Ghent), but in Urban
Legends the stakes are going to be even higher. If the choice is between
confronting a brutal killer or risking the lives of everyone they care about –
even the most innocent – what are they going to do? You’ll have to read the
book to find out…
About Helen:
Helen Grant writes YA contemporary thrillers. She
has lived in Germany and Belgium, and her novels to date have been set in those
countries. She now lives in Scotland with her husband, two children and two
cats, and is working on a new thriller set there. Check out her website and follow her on Twitter.
About Urban
Legends:
Urban Legends is Helen Grant’s sixth
novel and the third in her Forbidden
Spaces trilogy. It is published by Corgi (26th March 2015).
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