"Because they are so often told as news, contemporary legends force us to reevaluate life as we know it. They confront us with macabre, fantastic, horrific, or hilarious characters and events that seem to come straight out of myths and folktales but are repeated as present day facts. It is not at all easy to decide whether these often disturbing stories should be treated as reliable or dismissed as fantasy." "In this book Gillian Bennett traces the...