Die Liste will anhand der "Urban Legend"-Kategorie das Feld zwischen ruralem Folk Horror und städtischem Grauen ausloten. Mit dabei sind u. a. Ramsey Campbell, Arthur Machen, Clive Barker und Joel Lane.
ZitatHere in the UK, most of us now live in an urban world and the stories we tell often reflect the anxieties and fears of these environments. Folk-horror, a sub-genre that has seen huge successes in recent years, focuses on town dwellers out of their depth in rural communities or in nature.
Uncanny fiction that engages with urban (and suburban) settings – what are commonly called “urban legends” – does something very different. Horror and strange events frequently occur in the places where the characters spend their day-to-day lives, or in parts of the city they inhabit but have not explored, where the occult or troubling events are not centuries-old pagan survivals, but fresh events formed by the human-built environment.
When I was asked to contribute to Writing the Uncanny: Essays on Crafting Strange Fiction, I wanted to explore how urban environments give birth to their own myths, legends and folklore, providing fertile ground for the writer of uncanny fiction. It’s a notion that forms the bedrock of my last book, London Incognita, where hauntings and uncanny events occur in lonely underpasses, motorway flyovers, shopping centres and car parks.