'We've all heard the stories of what happens to those who go to lovers' lane and of the folly of flashing your lights at another car at night. We all know someone who knows someone that survived a meeting with Bloody Mary and another who picked up a hitchhiker that then disappeared. And we all know these stories aren't true. They're just urban legends. Right? Wrong. Sometimes the stories we hear are true. Often they're more than they seem. These are the urban legends with alien explanations and the alien encounters mistaken for urban legends. The line between one and the other is so blurred in this anthology of stories about Close Encounters of the Urban Kind that you will never look another urban legend the same way again.'
Source: back-cover blurb
'The very first story, Martin Livings' "Lollo," unfolds its revelations slowly, with a science fictional twist on the Menacing Cursed Toy story. The nature documentary about scientists collecting specimens of animal species provides a wonderful foreshadowing of the probable motivations of the unseen aliens who planted the grotesque clown doll which begins to move, then to pursue the children and their babysitter through the house with Intent. And it is made even more frightening by the use of the False Resolution technique, in which the Menace appears to have been vanquished and the protagonist finally relaxes into apparent safety, only to discover that what she took as incontrovertable evidence that she had successfully destroyed the killer clown doll was premature, and what seems to be a happy ending suddenly turns instead into a Lady and the Tiger ending.'
Source: The Billion Light-Year Bookshelf (http://www.billionlightyearbookshelf.com/reviews/closeencountersurbankind.shtml).
Sighted: 2/6/11
'In "Dead Letter Drop" Peter Kempshall [sic] takes us to the wreckage of Berlin in the immediate aftermath of World War II. Social disorder seems to just bring out the predator in some people, and it isn't long before the warnings begin going out by lip radio as friend tells friend to watch out for people who appear harmless but are in fact up to no good. But what if aliens were to find such social chaos a splendid hunting grounds for their own incomprehensible purposes? Or maybe that's what someone else wants everybody to think, and the aliens are in fact the targets.'
Source: the Billion Light-Year Bookshelf (http://www.billionlightyearbookshelf.com/reviews/closeencountersurbankind.shtml)
Sighted 2/6/11
