The most chilling campfire tales always start with some variation on “This really happened …” with bonus scare-points if you can add: “and not far from here.” As the longtime impresario of Cemetery Dance magazine, Richard Chizmar knows his way around a frightening story and he combines those two elements to powerful effect in his 2021 book Chasing the Boogeyman and its new sequel Becoming the Boogeyman. Both are deeply unsettling narratives that leave the reader questioning reality even as the more logical parts of the brain insist: It can’t be …
Set in the author’s actual hometown of Edgewood, Maryland, the first book chronicles the impact of a local serial killer during the late ’80s, when Chizmar was a young man just beginning to set off on his own, and he sets the stage by first immersing you in the nostalgia of days gone by before piercing that idyllic setting with news clippings and police accounts of the murders that shook his community and eventually became his own obsession. It’s a true crime book, but … without the ‘true” part. Chizmar is upfront about it being a work of fiction, but after that initial disclaimer, he plays it so straight as memoir that you get transfixed by the spell.
The sequel, Becoming the Boogeyman, is about the storyteller getting caught in that spiral, as well. Now in the present day, with his book about the killings and their unusual perpetrator finished and published, it explores the psychological aftereffects of so deeply immersing oneself in incidents of violence, cruelty and evil that you get lost in the shadows. The late Michelle McNamara’s killer-hunting book I’ll Be Gone in the Dark is a clear influence, along with Ray Bradbury, Stephen King, and other novelists who clearly see the beauty in the world around them, but become fixated on the darkness encroaching on the edges. Chizmar blends reality and fantasy in a way that can only be described as intoxicating: heightening your emotions, blunting your skepticism, and luring you into trouble. (Gallery Books, 2023) —Anthony Breznican, Hollywood Correspondent
