Trevor J. Blank is associate professor of communication at the
State University of New York at Potsdam. He is the editor of
Folklore and the Internet and Folk Culture in the Digital Age,
coeditor of Tradition in the Twenty-First Century, and author of
The Last Laugh: Folk Humor, Celebrity Culture, and Mass-Mediated
Disasters in the Digital Age and Toward a Conceptual Framework for
the Study of Folklore and the Internet. Follow him on Twitter:
@trevorjblank.
Lynne S. McNeill is assistant professor of English in the Folklore
Program at Utah State University, cofounder of the Digital Folklore
Project, and author of Folklore Rules. Her research interests
include legend, belief, fandom, and digital folklore. Follow her on
Twitter: @lynneSmcneill.
“[A] timely volume of essays on an important topic—the contributors
are doing groundbreaking folkloric work. By illuminating a
contemporary phenomenon, these essays make us rethink our
understandings of folkloric processes throughout history. The
volume is perhaps one of the first dedicated to the Slender Man
phenomenon (certainly the first by folklorists). . . . [T]he
authors make significant contributions to theories of ostension,
play, questions of real/fake, semiotics, community and individual
creation, digital communication, cosplay, and transmedia
studies.”
—Michael Dylan Foster, University of California, Davis
"This seminal work is a valuable read for people interested in
legends, children’s folklore, or horror. Any folklorist
particularly interested in ostensive practices, monsters, and
digital folklore, to name a few, will find this work extremely
useful."
—Western Folklore
"Slender Man is Coming is essential and enjoyable reading for
anyone working on belief, legend, the folkloresque, and related
topics, but it can be recommended more widely, too. The book would
be a useful outreach tool to offer those outside the discipline who
are unaware of folkloristic thinking about legend ostension and
crime, as it offers a brilliant informed view on the relationship
between online narratives and violence in real life."
—Folklore
"A valuable collection of the ongoing work to apply folkloristic
concepts to the emerging field of discourse generated by the
Internet. . . . The book is essential for legend scholars and for
those documenting how tradition continues to penetrate and inform
the Digital Revolution."
—Journal of Folklore Research
“Blank and McNeill's Slender Man Is Coming is remarkable for the
approaches it opens up. . . . If the contributions in this
excellent volume are to be taken as a guide, scholars of the
speculative and the fantastic looking to study viral internet
legends should be looking to folklorists for their cues.”
—The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts
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