Today’s Countdown to Halloween offering from Randy is a thriller with a touch of the odd about it…
[I] was on my way to pick up Chinese food … when a quickie news story came on the car radio. I almost slammed on the brakes in the middle of Greenbelt Road when I heard the reporter mention “young girl from the suburb of Edgewood” and the victim’s last name. Praying I was mistaken, I called home as soon as I got back to the apartment and spoke with my father. He didn’t know much more than I did, just enough to confirm that it had indeed been our neighbor Natasha. The conversation was brief and somber.
– from Chasing the Boogeyman
In 1988 Richard Chizmar, recent college grad, returns to the home of his mother and father in Edgewood, Maryland for one last summer before marrying his high school sweetheart, Kara, and moving away. Now that he sees his adolescence drawing to a close, he begins to appreciate the suburban idyllic that typified his childhood, the times spent with family, the adventures shared with friends, the freedom they had to roam the neighborhood.
But Richard has a dark side, of sorts. He loves reading and specifically crime, suspense, thriller and horror fiction. In spite of his freshly minted degree in journalism, he’s determined to write fiction for a living. Having already had stories accepted for publication, he’s both sending out new stories and starting his own magazine, Cemetery Dance. That’s his summer plan.
And then, just before he leaves college, a teenage girl is abducted and brutally strangled In Edgewood, the first of several girls murdered. Richard’s literary inclinations and the shock created by the jarring disconnect between his experiences in Edgewood and these acts of violence, draws him to follow the investigations and even tentatively investigate on his own. Not quite obsessed but unable to look away, Richard, his family, Kara and her reporter friend Carly, to varying degrees are all pulled into the social and psychological maelstrom caused by the killer.
To be clear, this is a work of fiction, but Chizmar has purposely framed it and written it as though it is true crime, placed himself and his family, including his then wife-to-be, as characters in the novel alongside fictional characters, and set it in his actual hometown. Chizmar’s description of Edgewood before the murders grounds the novel in the everyday and establishes his fondness for it, lending Edgewood a patina of near perfection; Edgewood becomes, through his eyes, an ideal setting for the blossoming of a young boy’s imagination. Enhancing and supporting this is his love for his family and friends, and that love lends verisimilitude to the sense of personal affront, anger and shock. These are blows against a community that has sheltered and nourished him and against people he knows or knows of, which is emphasized by his attention to the victims. They have names. They have lives. They have families that are damaged and sometimes destroyed by their loss.
Chasing the Boogeyman is solid, affecting and entertaining, and a potential poster boy for “compulsively readable.” Chizmar’s Edgewood seems familiar, like a compatriot of Ray Bradbury’s (fictional) Green Town, Illinois or Stephen King’s (fictional) Derry, Maine. Chizmar has worked with King who may have had an effect on how Chizmar’s fluid, everyday language creates a time and place and an engaging narrative voice in a thoughtful variation on the serial killer novel, one as concerned with the identities of the victims as with the identity of the killer.
(Gallery Books, 2022)
Review by Randy Money
