Mulliga's Myths and Folktales, Part 1 - An Illustrated History of Urban Legends

This Halloween, I'm featuring freaky folklore from around the world...everything from the Mothman, to Bloody Mary, to the alligators in New York sewers. Today's post looks at a fun, family-friendly gazetteer about these kinds of topics:

English author and illustrator Adam Allsuch Boardman has already written An Illustrated History of UFOs and An Illustrated History of Ghosts, so one gets the sense that he took all the material he had left over to write An Illustrated History of Urban Legends.  That's not necessarily a bad thing - like an Atlas Obscura for the occult, the book surveys a wide variety of apocryphal stories from around the world and throughout history that are interesting but hard to categorize - dead mice in Coke bottles, Stanley Kubrick faking the Moon landing, and the Abominable Snowman.

Everything is presented in a fun "explainer"-type format, with cartoony illustrations and simple, short flavor text. I could see this being a great title for bathroom or coffee table reading, especially if you have kids. The downside is that there's not much depth here, so if you're looking for a serious study of urban legends, this is not your book.