Damaged hero
Quest for justice
Monsters (the human kind)
Battles with same
Dark nights of the soul
Justice dealt
Injustice dealt

I find them thrilling, and they deal with things I’ve sort of known lay below the surface of a town I knew long ago as a kid but still visit every few years.

Serial killers are the modern boogeymen, human predators. Their lairs and killing grounds are still remembered, and (generally) avoided as if cursed considered cursed.

The internet sn’t a good substitute, because nothing visceral happens on it. It may show us awesome and awful things, like the haunted painting on eBay, but it’s not an agent of them. In fact, it’s probably killed urban legends. Internet memes and chain emails are just a continuation of the fads and manias recounted in books like Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness of Crowds, or Work Hard And You Will Be Rewarded.

I feel that many of our old fairy tales are still up to the job, though we often modernize or otherwise alter them in the retelling to make parts more applicable to our own society. But the story of Little Red Riding Hood is still the story of Little Red Riding Hood even if you set it in a city and switch the wolf for a more urban and urbane and human sort of predator. Certain patterns, motifs that really resonate with us will stick around for as long as human beings are human beings.

Maybe we have managed to add a few new creatures and archetypes to our collective imaginary menagerie in recent decades, though– Romero’s zombies spring (okay, shamble and groan) to mind. I don’t think they’re flash-in-the-pan.

Vance I read a lot of late 80s and then again late 90s. Perhaps time for some more of that. Never liked his fantasy setting stuff though.

Perfect chewing-gum-for-the-brain would be something along the lines of The Adventures of Jack (or Bobby) Shaftoe.

As the godfather of my best friend’s kids, is it a bad thing to already have a plan for their future reading?

Events outside of the internet itself are passed on in the same way. Look at the recent Susan Boyle phenomenon. You can buy fan made Su-Bo dolls. Will anyone care in year or two?

It’s that kind of thing that reminds me of tales shared by the fireside, ones that get passed on and grow with the telling until they become overblown and fantastic. It’s just that here, on the internet, it happens ridiculously quickly. Instead of these stories achieving a true, lingering, legendary status, they are quickly forgotten as we move on to the Next Big Thing.

BigJonno:
Our fairy tales are born, live and die on the internet, or at least those of a mythological bent, rather than the cautionary tale variety, are.

Can you give some examples?

It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about forums, chatrooms, MMOs, blogs or whatever, the internet is built around human, albeit remote, interaction. Where people interact, stories are born and people will tell and re-tell those stories. The internet is almost tailor-made for stories to spread, flourish and achieve mythological status. Some never make it past their original peer group, others go as far as the mainstream. Some even make it onto t-shirts.

The flipside of this is the equal rapidity with which these tales die out. I’m often reminded of how, in Transmetropolitan, aliens make contact and their entire culture is popularised, used and then dumped by humanity in a couple of years. We have fairy tales that are hundreds of years old, myths that date back to ancient civilisations, but globally popular, modern-day legends that will be lucky to be more than a tired old joke next week.