Curses! Broiled Again!

by Jan Harold Brunvand

Did your cousin's wife's dentist's daughter go to the tanning parlor once too often and had her insides cooked? Has your husband's brother's nephew teacher try to make a dead rabbit look alive? If so, you've heard—or you yourself may have told—two of the seventy-plus legends in this collection.


Urban legends are "those bizarre but believable stories about batter-fried rats, spiders in hairdos, Cabbage Patch dolls that get funerals, and the like that pass by word of mouth as being the gospel truth." But of course, though often told as having happened to a FOAF (friend of a friend), they aren't true. Included in this collection are legends about sex, horror, cars, business, and academia. Among them are "The Bible Student's Exam," "The Pregnant Shoplifter," "The Ice Cream Cone Caper," "Don't Mess with Texas," and "Mrs. Fields' Cookie Recipe."

Genres: Folklore, Nonfiction, Urban Legends, Humor, Urban, Mythology, Pop Culture

335 pages, Paperback

First published August 17, 1990

About the author

Jan Harold Brunvand (born 1933) is a professor emeritus of English at the University of Utah in the United States, best known for spreading the concept of the urban legend, or modern folklore. Before his work, folk tales were associated with ancient times or rural cultures; Brunvand's breakthrough was to take concepts developed in the academic study of traditional folktales and apply them to stories circulating in the modern world.

Brunvand is the author of several well-known books on the topic of urban legends, starting with The Vanishing Hitchhiker in 1981. This book brought urban legends to popular attention in the United States. Follow-up works include The Choking Doberman (1984), The Mexican Pet (1988), Curses! Broiled Again! (1990), The Baby Train (1993), and others. He also edited the one-volume American Folklore: An Encyclopedia (1996), as well as several textbooks.

Born in Cadillac, Michigan, Brunvand received a Ph.D. in folklore from Indiana University in 1961. He taught at several U.S. universities before joining the University of Utah in 1966. He retired in 1996, but remains a popular speaker and writer; he gave the keynote address at the 2003 meeting of the Missouri Folklore Society, of which he is a longtime member.

Reviews

[Christy · Rating 3 out of 5]

You’ll have to jump back to the late eighties, when most of these stories were collected. Things like microwave ovens and tanning beds were the height of new technology, so they terrified lots of people, and inspired the worst urban legends of the time. Didn’t we all hear of small pets being accidentally microwaved, and brides-to-be having their insides broiled from too many visits to the tanning salons? Some of the legends were so ridiculous nobody could have believed them, (I’m thinking of the “blow dried” bunny, dead, of course) but others, like somebody paying $250 dollars for the Mrs. Fields cookie recipe, were standard fare. Overall, the stories are lots of fun, but there’s too much discussion of where they might have come from, and how they might have evolved. I used to read Brunvand’s column in the Deseret News, and I always enjoyed it. I think his material is better suited to daily snippets, and doesn’t stretch out very well in book form.

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

A little wearisome at time, but then again, most urban legends are. (Especially when you've heard them eleventy billion times already.)

[Jared · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a rare book that goes on both the fiction and nonfiction shelves. It's a collection of urban legends, many of which are pretty funny.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great, fun book about all kinds of urban legends. Really fun read.

[Melissa · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don’t really know what I expected from a 30 year old book about urban legends.

[Dorothy Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although it's a little dated now, this collection of urban legends is still fascinating. I've heard many of these "true stories."

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this back in the day...it hasn't aged well.

[Audrey Staggs · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a fantastic exploration into common urban legends of its time, as well as thorough debunkings that leave the reader satisfied. Highly recommend for urban legend lovers like myself!!

[Mark A.]

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[Tracey · Rating 3 out of 5]

I pulled Curses! Broiled Again! off the bookshelf last month for a re-read - after juggling several other books, I finished this one earlier today.

Brunvand, a folklorist and college professor, has been researching urban legends for at least 20 years and has written or co-written about a dozen books on the subject. In each chapter, he recounts the legend, adds in variants as he's heard/read them and then investigates the possibility of it being true, as well as the larger implications of the legend itself.

The title comes from the story about a young woman who visits several tanning salons over a period of a few days - only to notice that she's starting to smell funny. Upon visiting the doctor, she is told that she has cooked her internal organs and has very little time to live. The "lessons learned" are a) beware of new-fangled technology/shortcuts b) vanity isn't worth the effort.

His writing style is casual, rather than scholarly; however he does cite his sources whenever possible, contacting police departments and newspaper offices on a regular basis. The book does have descriptive chapter titles as well as an index, so if you're looking to prove your Aunt Ethel wrong when she tells you about the woman who was selling her soon-to-be-ex-husband's sports car for a pittance, as he'd asked her to send him the money for a gambling trip to Vegas with his secretary, you can easily find the story.

Recommended to anyone with an interest in oral storytelling, folklore and urban legends.

[John Grigsby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone knows someone who knows someone to whom this really happened. Remember the girl who tanned so much that she cooked herself from the inside out? How about the kid who suffered a serious injury from eating Halloween candy that had a razor blade inside it? What about the little girl who died on the merry-go-round when bitten by snakes that had nested inside the old wooden horse? Tales so believable that they must be true, right? This book is packed with over 70 of your favorite FOAF (friend-of-a-friend) stories and urban legends.

I confess. I love a good urban legend, and I've even been caught by a few in my time. Thus, this book was a delight for me and would be so for anyone who, like me, enjoys a good yarn that seems just a little too good to be true. Jan Harold Brunvand brings another collection of FOAF stories and tales to both thrill (and secretly delight) us. If, like me, you can kill a few hours exploring Snopes.com, you will enjoy this book immensely.

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of it is outdated, but I still hear people talking about the "acid stars'. Brunvand was the great debunker of that urban legend. When I was in college over 20 years ago I read one of his books. He taught me a lot of valuable lessons, about believing a lot of the garbage that goes around. It does make it hard when you know the warnings & 'stories' that everyone are passing around are bunk (see my snide smirk).

[Ness · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wow. As Halloween was approaching, I picked up this book on a whim to read up on some urban legends. It was written by a Utah professor so I thought it would be neat to hear some local tales. However, I failed to see that it was published the year I was born. So, not only was it outdated, but it was also VERY boring. Instead of actually telling the tales, he breaks them down, analyzes them and then proceeds to tell four or five "different" versions of the them. My brain slightly imploded.

[Trin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I seem to be addicted to Brunvand’s urban legend books. This is one of his longest, but not one of his best—I really like the whole section devoted to academic legends, but in general, his earlier books had the choicest (creepiest) legends and the most in-depth analysis. The Vanishing Hitchhiker is still, I think, the most satisfying and shiver-inducing.

[HeavyReader · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got turned on to urban legands when I took a folklore class in college. I really got into reading urban legends and had a whole series of books by this author. I liked to read urban legends when I was depressed. They made me laugh and distracted me from my problems.

[Kate Ressman]

My biggest problem is that I kept reading and thinking, but the Mythbusters... oh, right written before Mythbusters.

I remember enjoying the heck out of these sort of books as a kid though. The Choking Doberman anyone?