Chasing the Boogeyman

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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 has adapted the works of many bestselling authors including Stephen King, Peter Straub, and Bentley Little. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. This led me to believe there would be a second interview but nope, the book ends, and we never do get those answers.

Whilst we don’t get anything so overtly dramatic as, for example, the ending of Stephen King’s underrated masterpiece Joyland, like Dante, we do get a confrontation with pure evil, a moment where we look the Devil in the eye at the nadir—the inverse apex—of existence. This is one of the those books where the story is just as important as the format, and both worked together to create that perfect narrative. 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.The final revelation of the murderer was surprising, but only because there were no clues that would have led to that conclusion. The author includes photos of the victims and the crime scenes after each chapter and is really detailed in describing the events. I will undoubtedly recommend this book to anyone that loves horror or true crime as it was one incredible reading experience that just felt so real.

It's like the guy sliced open a hole in the night," one state trooper complained off the record, "and disappeared back into it. They represent a duality that runs through the whole novel: a night and day cycle that seems to represent the alternation between the conscious and unconscious mind. But if we step back from how “real” it all feels and just look at it as a novel, for a second, there is brilliant work here.

The small criticisms I had of the book are that 1) there is no resolution to the issue of what certain evidence left at the crime scene and on memorials mean, and 2) the long windedness of Chizmar on some of his personal reflections (especially at the beginning of the book) that have nothing to do with the main storyline of the book. In the midst of preparing for his wedding and embarking on a writing career, he soon finds himself thrust into the real-life horror story. I really liked to read true crime in my younger years, but as time went on I felt more and more guilty of having a few hours of "entertainment" at the cost of other people's misery, up to the point that I just quit the whole genre. Maryland State Police Department and Federal Bureau of Investigation promised to continue pursuing active leads and testing additional person of interests. Chizmar’s novel isn’t just a clever riff on genre; it’s a meditation on the dangers and darkness of home, on what happens when the place where we grew up finally grows up itself—or at least when it discovers the violence it’s capable of….