Chasing the Boogeyman

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Authentic-looking photos at the end of each chapter of such people as victims, police personnel, and ordinary residents of Edgewood reinforce the true crime conceit. He is privy to the details that the police held back from the Public because of the friendships he formed with Detective Lyle Harper and reporter, Carly Allbright. Perfect for fans of true crime, meticulously orchestrated, and clever beyond measure, Chasing the Boogeyman will leave you guessing long after you've read the last page.

As a fan of true crime it was very hard to believe that this is a work of fiction throughout the whole read. I got through it in two days—but only because I started late the first day and had to take a break to sleep—and I was so into the story, I ended up with insomnia. We don’t think anything of it, until a moment later where we put two and two together and realise it was the boogeyman—he was right there, we literally just missed him—it makes the heart plummet through the bottom of one’s stomach. His latest book, The Girl on the Porch, was released in hardcover by Subterranean Press, and Widow’s Point, a chilling novella about a haunted lighthouse written with his son, Billy Chizmar, was recently adapted into a feature film.

It creates a feeling of authenticity that, along with the true crime narrative style used here, makes it hard to dispute or look away from. A clever, terrifying, and heartrending work of metafiction, Chasing the Boogeyman is the ultimate marriage between horror fiction and true crime. I originally wanted to read this book because of the fact that Chizmar has co-written a book with the legendary Stephen King and even King himself said this was “genuinely chilling” and that’s all I needed to know. Absolutely riveting… Richard Chizmar’s keen ability to tell the small-town-tale, investigative insight, and captivating eye for detail, come together in this perfect storm of true crime horror.

It neither grab nor held my attention, making it a long and difficult journey to get through this book. This final “interview” is harrowing reading, brilliantly written, and clearly inspired by the likes of Bundy and Gein. He takes up the gauntlet and of course becomes involved with the murders and its abhorrent mutilations while the town gossips and lives in fear. Despite the blurb comparing this story to Stephen King and Michelle McNamara, I failed to see a resemblance. Chasing The Boogeyman will leave you questioning what and who is real, and will have you checking your window is locked more than once during the long night.Every time I took a break from the computer screen and glanced outside, I imagined the ghosts of my childhood friends sprinting shirtless across the lawn, whooping with laughter and disappearing into the wavering shadows, beneath the towering weeping willow whose spindly branches had snagged so many of our taped-up Wiffle balls and provided hours of cooling shade in which to play marbles and eat pizza subs and trade baseball cards. To add that extra touch of realism, the pictures you’ll see used across many chapters in this book showing characters, places, and much more are all truly bone-chilling. To illustrate: there is a scene in which a young girl tells their parents that a monster was tapping at their window, and their concerns are dismissed as idle fantasy. Law enforcement, as well as members of the FBI are certain that the killer is a living, breathing madman—and he’s playing games with them.

Chizmar’s Chasing the Boogeyman has been written upon missing person flyers and published on telephone poles. This could be the story you read over your morning cornflakes; cruel, unremittingly sad but so plausible. Many have classified the novel as horror, but this particular Constant Reader needs more than a serial killer nicknamed the Boogeyman to feel any twitches or tingles. But, alas, it was all a product of the author's mind, so when I finished the book, there was nothing else to seek out, nor was there anything else left to discuss.

My only issue was that I felt the hopscotch grid, things left by the boogeyman at the scene and the numerology were an important part of the story, yet their significance was never explained. It’s worth noting that many contemporaries of Dante actually believed he had been to Hell: the vividness of his descriptions, as well as the force of his personality, suggested an authentic mystical experience. Sprinkled throughout, as with most true crime books, are photographs of the different players and locations. Chizmar's personal relationship with the town and some of the victims adds another layer, as his first-person account blurs the line between reality and fiction.