When I first started clipping newspaper articles and jotting down notes about the tragic events that transpired in my hometown of Edgewood, Maryland, during the summer and autumn of 1988, I had no thoughts of one day turning those scattered observations into a full-length book.
Many of my closest friends and colleagues have a hard time believing this to be true, but I promise that is the case. Perhaps something working deep in the basement of my subconscious had an inkling there might be a story here to tell, but the surface-world Rich Chizmar, a fresh-faced twenty-two-year-old—who on an early June afternoon loaded up his meager belongings into the back seat and trunk of his dirt-brown Toyota Corolla and headed north on I-95 to his parents' house at the corner of Hanson and Tupelo Roads—had no clue whatsoever.
All I knew was this: three days earlier, a few blocks from where Id grown up, a young girl had been taken from her bedroom in the middle PRAISE FOR CHASING THE BOOGEYMAN
"Chasing the Boogeyman is genuinely chilling and something brand new and exciting. Compulsive reading and scary I thought often of I'l Be Gone in the Dark, but never to the story's detriment. Ray Bradbury's influence is all over it, but he never could've written that ending. Chasing the Boogeyman does what true crime so often cannot: it offers both chills and a satisfying conclusion."
—Stephen King
"Hammer in hand, Richard Chizmar's come to shatter the idea that everything's already been done. An absolutely chilling mash-up of styles, media, biography, and legend. Elastic, unsettling, brilliant. And here you thought you knew the names of every genre." —Josh Malerman, New York Times bestselling author of Bird Box and Malorie
"Brilliant.. Absolutely fascinating, totally compelling, and immensely poignant. I dare you not to finish it in one sitting. This one will stay with me!"
-C. J. with us to the funeral, won't you? You and Josh graduated together, right?" On and on like that.
I assured her that no, I couldn't imagine losing a baby sister (it didn't matter one bit that I was the youngest of the Chizmar children and therefore didn't have a baby sister; that clearly wasn't the point), and yes, of course I’d go with them to the funeral, and yes, Josh and I had in fact graduated together, although we hadn't been particularly close, the two of us running with different crowds.
Even at such a relatively young age, I was already well on my way to becoming a reformed Catholic, but my folks were about as devout as they came, especially my mom. When the world around her suffered—
4p_Chizmar_ChasingTheBoogeyman_CM.indd 2 a deadly earthquake in Asia, floods in South America, a distant second cousin diagnosed with treatable cancer; it didn't matter how near or faraway mother suffered right alongside each and every one of them. She’d always been that way.
Almost breathless by this point in the conversation, Mom went on to say that she and Norma Gentile, our elderly next-door neighbor, had gone to mass every morning for the past week to pray for the Gallagher family. They'd also walked over a platter of homemade fried chicken and coleslaw to show their support. I could hear my father's muffled voice in the background then, chastising my mother for keeping me on the phone for so long, and she scolded him right back with an emphatic "Oh, you hush." When she got back on the line, she apologized for being so upset and chewing my ear off, declaring that nothing like this had ever happened in Edgewood.