Chasing the Boogeyman (The Boogeyman Series)

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Chasing the Boogeyman perfectly captures the feeling of growing up in a small town facing an existential threat from real evil. Chizmar’s Edgewood is post-Bradbury-esque, not as idyllic as that author’s Green Town...it’s grittier and more grounded in a reality contemporary readers will recognize and respond to. Richard Chizmar has invented a new literary genre—brilliant!” Chizmar takes a very unique approach to this book. He sets the book in his hometown during the late 1980s, where a number of young girls are abducted and murdered. This is a fast paced novel that follows the few months where these incidents took place. It's written with Chizmar as one of the main characters in the book, a recent journalism graduate living at home for a few months before getting married and moving to another city. He and another journalist are invested in helping to figure out who committed these atrocious acts. There was, Carly explained, one interesting trend beginning to emerge in Edgewood, and, just as the satanic panic and multiple serial killer theories could be attributed to a recent increase in gossip—somewhere along the line, suspicion had begun to replace caution—so to could this new pattern of behavior. In the days following Madeline Wilcox‘s death, there’d been a sudden sharp increase in the number of verbal arguments and physical altercations occurring between local residents. Loose lips and drunken slurs lead to fistfights in parking lots and front yard. Joking around turned serious and then violent. Old feuds where rekindled, and new ones started. A rash of false accusations broke out, and it took an official warning from police to tamp it down. The tip-line took in calls at a record pace, but most of them more trivial nonsense, and law enforcement was considering shutting the whole thing down.” Described as part memoir, part fiction that reads like TRUE CRIME, it is so believable that I kept thinking I misread something! I even googled the “crime” halfway through to see if it at least closely resembled an actual event!! I have no complaints or issues with this book. Chasing the Boogeyman had me on the edge of my seat for the entire length of the book. Speaking as someone who has their nose in book at all times, there are not many novels that draw you in like this one does. Where can I buy it?

the Boogeyman | Book by Richard Chizmar | Official Becoming the Boogeyman | Book by Richard Chizmar | Official

One of the Goodreads Most Popular Horror Novels of 2021 and a Goodreads Choice Award nominee for Best Books of 2021

Overall, there’s nothing negative I can say about Chasing the Boogeyman. Readers will love it, regardless of if you’re a true crime, horror, mystery, or thriller fan. It has all the pieces and is one of my only five-star books of the year. I can’t wait to read more from Chizmar.

Chasing the Boogeyman Book Review — Confetti Bookshelf Chasing the Boogeyman Book Review — Confetti Bookshelf

Chasing The Boogeyman is an ultra-intimate unraveling of a community under an extreme terror threat. Writing as a fictional persona of himself and setting the plot in his hometown, the author delivers a uniquely descriptive work that delves with delicious detail into the dark heart of Americana in 1988. ” — Horror Nation Curious by nature and interested in true crime, Richard fully immerses himself in the case, much to the frustration of the real detective, Lyle Harper. Richard starts asking questions around town with the assistance of Carly Albright, a local reporter and friend of his fiancée. Through her he gains invaluable inside information, a trusted friend and a partner in the investigation. The story of the chasing of the Boogey Man becomes Richard’s own quest to make sense of the events. RC: The first issue was published in December 1988 when I was a senior in college, but I started reading submissions and promoting the magazine earlier that summer. I had no idea at the time if we would survive a year or a decade. It didn’t really matter. I just kept my head down and focused on the work on my desk. The first book we published – three years later – was an extraordinary collection of crime and suspense fiction by Ed Gorman. It was called Prisoners and Other Stories. Dean Koontz wrote the afterword.JJ: One of the best things about the story is that you, Richard Chizmar, are the main character. What made you decide to go meta?Did it just come naturally?

Chasing the Boogeyman by Richard Chizmar | Waterstones Chasing the Boogeyman by Richard Chizmar | Waterstones

We're all chasing the boogeyman, aren't we? The boogeyman's the past, the truth, our fragile memories that knit the two together. What Richard Chizmar's done for us in Chasing the Boogeyman is give that narrative a taut dramatic line he balances on, never quite tipping one way or the other, just stepping sure-footed all the way to the end—showing us that this is a walk we can all take, if we have the nerve." — Stephen Graham Jones, New York Times bestselling author of The Only Good Indians Chasing the Boogeyman is an intelligent novel about a serial killer terrifying a small town in Maryland in the 1980s. 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.Whilst my editors have advised me that it is not proper etiquette to accuse an author of murder, I think it is noteworthy to state that Richard Chizmar himself was at the top of my suspect list while reading this novel. After spending several months binge-watching Criminal Minds, I feel I can safely add “FBI investigator” to my resume. Speaking as an expert in the “who-done-it” field, this reviewer found Chizmar’s fascination with the crime to be highly suspect. With Chizmar clipping newspaper articles, listening to a police scanner, and questioning local news outlets and even the sheriff himself for more information, I feel the crew at the BAU [the Behavior Analysis Unit of the FBI , made notorious from Criminal Minds]would have scooped him up early on. Finding Chizmar’s alibis for the nights of the murders shaky at best, I wondered if Richard Chizmar himself was The Boogeyman. What did not work? I recommend Chasing the Boogeyman by Richard Chizmar to those readers who like excellently written books. … I recommend this novel to fans of true crime, to people who are encountering a reading slump, and readers of spine chillers and mystery books.” — Gobookmart The first of the killings, of a young girl abducted from her bedroom in the middle of the night, occurs not far from Chizmar’s parents’ house. Three more follow, plunging Edgewood’s citizens into panic and apprehension. Chizmar and a fellow obsessive named Carly Albright do some amateur sleuthing that appears to inflame the killer, who takes to bombarding Chizmar with hang-up calls and scrawling an ominous message on Albrigt’s front porch. There are, however, no immediate leads to the killer’s identity, and it seems the case is destined to join those of the Green River and Zodiac killings in the annals of unsolved American murder sprees, but some decades-after-the-fact surprises are in store. A railroad system constructed through the area in 1835 provided distribution for local agricultural markets, and the railroad’s extension in the mid-1850s provided a foundation for the town of Edgewood’s development. The wooden railroad bridge crossing the nearby Gunpowder River was burned in April 1861 during the Baltimore riots, and Confederate soldiers burned it a second time in July 1864.