We had the great opportunity to chat with New York Times best-selling author Richard Chizmar about his life, his career as a writer and publishing company owner, his collaboration with Stephen King, and his new novel Chasing the Boogeyman.
Read our review of the novel here!
Horror Geek Life: Starting at the beginning, what was the first horror content that you can remember absorbing as a kid?
Richard Chizmar: I was one of five kids, the youngest, so there was a lot of hand-me-down books and comics, but also a lot of big family movie nights. I know, visually, some of the first scary content I remember was from movies like The Wizard of Oz and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I remember having nightmares about the child napper in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. In Wizard of Oz, my favorite parts were the ones that scared me, the flying monkeys, the witch, and the trees that would come to life and grab you. One of my first solo experiences, and I’m still not certain which version it was, but I watched by myself one afternoon, one of the Ten Little Indians adaptations in black-and-white, and I have no idea how old I was, probably seven or eight, but it scared the devil out of me. As far as reading, and we had a big family of readers, I would probably say an early Alfred Hitchcock Presents anthology or the children’s books that I’ve long forgotten the titles of. Trips to the library were regular occurrences, but I do remember an oversized Alfred Hitchcock hardcover which was actually given to me as a gift.
HGL: It’s crazy how terrifying stuff made for kids was back then. What literary work stuck with you as a kid that made you want to become a writer?
JC: Oh, yeah. It’s totally different now. Because I was such a big reader, and from a family of big readers, I was surrounded by books, and it was a very natural pastime. I just liked the ability to be transported to another place, another time, and in some cases, a different world. One of the first big experiences that made me want to become a writer was when I read The Monkey in tenth grade. My English teacher brought in photocopies of the chat book, I think it was in Cavalier women’s magazine or something. We read that aloud in class and I remember it takes a lot shut up a bunch of 15-and-16-year-old wise asses, and we took turns reading the story. By the time we were done, I just remember thinking, “Wow!” I looked at everyone else and I knew they were feeling the same thing I was, and I was like “Man, I would love to do that.” That was the first concrete moment, but even before then, something had to happen, because I wrote stories as early as eight or nine years old. I used to write war stories and monster stories, and even as cheesy as it sounds, I remember when my mom was watching The Waltons on television, I would always kind of roll my eyes until I found out that John-Boy wanted to be a writer, and I got a little more interested. So, yeah, even from an earlier age, the idea of creating my own stories was there.
HGL: Getting into your writing a little, do you prefer writing longer novels, or short stories and novellas, and what are the differences in the writing processes between those two?
RC: You know, it’s interesting because maybe until the last however many years, maybe eight, maybe a little longer, it’s always been mainly short stories with a handful of novellas sprinkled in there. That was largely due to the publishing company. When I started Cemetery Dance, I was a writer before that, and I was selling short stories to a lot of the small press markets back in the late ’80s and early ’90s. I started the magazine and before long, that quickly ate up all my time, and some of the writing took a back seat, but I was still churning out some short stories. Around 2000, I got involved in film and sold some screenplays, did some re-writes, and had some things produced. But it wasn’t until eight or nine years ago that I finally said, “You know what? I’ve got a great staff at Cemetery Dance; they know what they’re doing, and I can finally take this time for myself.” That’s when I put together A Long December and wrote the title novella, and then continued churning out slightly longer pieces, and then Gwendy came along with Stephen King, and the first one was a novella, but the second one that I wrote solo was pretty much a short novel, and then Boogeyman, and the next book I’m working on now. Whether I have a favorite or not? I’m actually not sure.
I think short stories are easier for me, you’re in and you’re out. A short story that might take a long time for me, is like a week. But I had an absolute blast writing Boogeyman and Gwendy’s Final Task with Steve, which is a full-length novel. So, I’m enjoying all of it now. That’s kind of the neat thing. Because there was such a delay where I was predominantly a publisher and editor, it all kind of feels new to me again. That’s a nice feeling to have when you’re in your 50’s.
HGL: Since you started Cemetery Dance Publications in 1988, what are some of the major perks and challenges you’ve been met with over the 30+ year run?
RC: It was a passion for me! Cemetery Dance exists because of magazines like The Horror Show, which was an old David Silva publication, you know, Twilight Zone magazine, I loved reading those. Every time a new issue showed up in the mail or on the news stand, I was like a kid in a candy store. It’s pretty cool that Cemetery Dance has filled that void for a lot of readers for a lot of years. It was wonderful for me. It was all on-the-job training. I had no idea what I was doing, editorially nor from a business standpoint. It’s all learning on the job, making mistakes, and trying not to make the same mistake twice, then making it again, and trying even harder.
For me, it was just this great training ground where I got to meet a bunch of people. My skill set as an editor, a publisher, an advertising director, and designer, all that stuff, got better over the years, and the biggest perk of all was that I was just doing what I loved to do. I graduated from the University of Maryland with a journalism degree, and I never even put together a resume, because I was determined to make Cemetery Dance work somehow. I’m always very upfront with the newer folks and tell them, “Look, those first ten years, I made no money at all. Trust me, I’m not exaggerating, not understating, it was just a work of passion, but building it year-after-year, you come to place where it’s a functional business.” I was able to do what I love for all those years, and still am. For me it’s dream come true stuff because I don’t know what else I’d be doing.
HGL: Which one of your stories or books has been your favorite to write, and which has been the most important for your career?
RC: In some ways, the one that was the most important for my career might have been A Long December because that collection was kind of my entry back into the writing world. It represented my best short fiction from a period of like 20 years. I knew I needed a strong corner piece novella in the book to kind of anchor it and I was really happy with that. I felt like it contained a lot of heart, but it was also kind of twisty with a nice surprise ending, and the reviewers were really kind to it. I got a bunch of starred reviews and it sold really well for Bill Schafer over at Subterranean Press, and I think it reminded a lot of people who had forgotten or didn’t know in the first place, that I was a writer before I was an editor or publisher. The easiest answer is Gwendy’s Button Box because it went on through the New York Times best-sellers list and it put me in front of an awful lot of people that otherwise I would not have reached.
As far as the most fun? That’s really tough because Boogeyman was so much fun to write, despite the dark subject matter, it was kind of a guilty pleasure. I was writing about my family, my friends, and my own background so it really felt like I was just playing and having a good time. On the other hand, writing with your literary hero, who you grew up with his books not figuratively, but literally in your back pocket walking around. I was always the guy with the books and the guy with the scary stories, so it’s kind of come full circle, to get to write with him. That all leads to me saying that my favorite experience was probably Widow’s Point, because I wrote it with my son, and that’s a rare thing. Billy and I had fun with that and when we finished, we didn’t know what people would think. It was kind of this everything but the kitchen sink, supernatural ghost story, and to have it be well-received and sell a nice chunk of copies, and since it’s publication it’s sold to Italy, France, Germany, Brazil, and a handful of other countries. None of that was planned, and it was just a dad and his kid writing a scary story together. That will probably always be my favorite.
HGL: That is so awesome. Regarding Gwendy’s Button Box, how exactly did that process of co-writing with Stephen King work, and what was the initial feeling from the news of getting to work with your idol?
RC: Just stunned, haha. It was interesting because we were e-mailing about collaborations, and I was the one who brought up the subject of those “Round-Robin” type projects where you have anywhere from half-dozen to a dozen authors writing different chapters of the same story. It was something that was fairly new to me, and I found it intriguing. I asked him what he thought about that, and he said, “Ehh, you know, I think they’re hard to do well,” and then we started talking about collaborations. By the end of the exchange, he had mentioned that he had a story that he’d started a while back, that he’d never been able to finish. As a friend, I told him I’d love to read that. Again, talking about perks, that’s one of the perks of being friends with Stephen King, sometimes getting to read stuff in advance, so he’ll e-mail me a manuscript and ask me what I think, or he’ll send a novel in advance that just came back from copy-editing. I didn’t think too much of it, but the next morning I got an e-mail, and it said, “Gwendy’s attached, do with it as you wish.” I e-mailed him right back and said, “You want me to take a whack at finishing it?”, and he said, “If you read it, you like it, and think you can, absolutely!” That was on a Friday, and I didn’t tell a soul, not even my family, until Sunday, because after that initial five-minute sense of euphoria, the idea of sitting down and finishing a story of his was just pretty terrifying.
That Monday, I decided to get right to it, and pulled out a yellow pad to jot down some notes, which I don’t usually do. I usually dive in, but for continuity and to make sure I had character’s names correct, and my hand was shaking while holding the pen. I finally threw the pen down and was like “This is ridiculous,” and I opened my laptop and I just started typing, and I think I knocked out like 10,000 words in the next few days. As soon as I opened my laptop and started writing, I was in Castle Rock, the nerves were gone, and I wasn’t scared anymore. Typical good Stephen King storytelling, where once you’re in it, everything else disappears. I legitimately remember many times after the fact, when it was set for publication, and after it came out, thinking, “I have no idea how I did that.”
HGL: How crazy is it that you actually felt safe going into Castle Rock?
RC: Yeah, Steve was like, “You probably know Castle Rock just as well as I do,” and I was like, “No, Bev Vincent did,” because I used Bev’s resources all the time, but I loved the character of Gwendy that he created, and it was fun. He had an interesting point, he said, “The fact that she was a young girl, something that neither one of us are, obviously, probably made it a little easier for us to kind of approach her from an outside standpoint.” The fact that he is surrounded by women in his life, and I grew up with three older sisters, we kind of had something unique there to add to it. It went from exhilaration to terror back to perplexed exhilaration of…I’m finished, he likes it, we’ve gone back-and-forth, and tweaked each other’s work, and I was like, “How the hell does any of this happen?”
HGL: Do you and Stephen King have any plans to write another story together?
RC: Well, the third one will be out in February, called Gwendy’s Final Task, and that’s a full-length novel. After that, who knows? Technically, it was a one-shot, and I had the idea for the second one, e-mailed him, and he loved the idea, telling me I needed to write it. He said he was going to be busy with Holly Gibney for the foreseeable future, I think he was working on End of Watch at the time. I took that as I would write the first draft and he would write the second draft later, but when I sent him the manuscript, it was a misunderstanding and he meant for me to write it, but he offered to edit it. That was terrifying in a different way, because I realized I had resurrected the town of Castle Rock and some characters like the deputy, who was now Sheriff Norris Ridgewick. Those are things I would not have been bold enough to do unless I knew Stephen King was writing it with me. He was kind enough to thoroughly edit it and give it a really nice introduction so that his fans wouldn’t crucify me and say, “Who the hell do you think you are, writing about Castle Rock by yourself?”
So, the third book was his idea. The way it became a trilogy was when the second book was sold to Simon & Schuster, the marketing department approached us and asked what the chances were for there being another book, because if we could call it a series or trilogy, it really opens it up to some unique marketing opportunities. I asked Stephen and he said, “Yeah, you can call it a trilogy, we’ll find another story in there.” So, he came up with the idea for the third book, we exchanged some texts and set aside some time and wrote it. Like I said, this one is much longer. It’s significantly longer than the first two books put together.
HGL: Let’s talk about Chasing the Boogeyman. It’s an extremely unique novel that takes this Joseph Wambaugh-style true crime approach, with a fictional serial killer story and some very personal truths about your life. How did you come up with that idea?
RC: I need to go back and pre-date an outline, so I look really smart and like I planned it from the beginning, but it didn’t happen that way, it was just a happy accident. I’ve always been a true crime fan, and always thought it’d be interesting for me to write a true crime book. I felt like I’d be the right kind of writer, to take that responsibility of telling a story like that in a proper way. Something that’s always put me off from that was the sheer amount of research. One day, I said to myself that I’d like to write a novel set in a true crime format, because then I could just make a lot of it up. It still has to be educated and researched, but not to the extent of a real crime. I always wanted to write a story set in my hometown, so I set off to write this crime story and right away, going back to my own experiences, I realized I was going to put a bunch of that in the book. I also realized that I was not going to be able to fake that the guy I was writing about was me.
I decided I was going to put myself in this, and it’s interesting, because I’m very much a behind-the-scenes kind of person. I don’t get out much or go to a lot of writer’s conferences or conventions. To shine the spotlight on myself was a weird choice, but it just felt like the story was in control. I just decided to go with it, and I wasn’t going to bat an eye; either it was going to work, or it’s not. I was committed to shaping it as true crime book, and that’s where the photographs came in. I knew I wanted to put them at the end of each chapter because it would, in some ways, ambush the reader. They’re right there in your face and you don’t have to turn to a central photo section in the book. When I read true crime books, one of my main practices was I would always flip back-and-forth to the photos section, because when they talked about a crime scene, I wanted to see it. I didn’t want to see it because of the blood or gore, because most of those books didn’t have that. They’re very mundane crime scenes, it’s behind the shed, or there’s this tree. For me, it helped place me there in that moment. Also, I’d want to see the face of this detective they were talking about for 50 pages, or a family member, or someone. It added poignancy to the book, so I knew I wanted to do that with Boogeyman. It just kind of snowballed. The only smart thing I did was decided I wanted the true crime format, and the rest of the story dictated that it was going to use this Chizmar guy, and his family was going to be in it, and his friends. When you read the book, I open up talking about the town’s history and my childhood, because that’s how a lot of true crime books are presented. They give you the nuts and bolts first and then they get into the story.
HGL: Was it emotional for you to dive into your past when writing about your family and friends, and things that went on at that time period?
RC: Yeah, but only in a good way. People have asked how much of it was real because Edgewood is kind of a tough place. It’s always been a tough place. It’s much tougher now, don’t get me wrong, there’s more crime. Back when I was a kid, there was a wrong side of the tracks, and now the wrong side is much bigger. But I did have this kind of idyllic childhood and was one of those people who was fortunate enough to come from a close family. We were dysfunctional in many ways, which I don’t go into in the book, because it would have been much longer, but we were a close-knit family, a lot of love, a lot of doing stuff together, and I just tried to capture the fact that when I came back from college, it was really just me and my parents. Everybody else was older and moved on. It was me laying in my old bedroom, looking out my window into the side yard where I used to play all the time with my friends, and that happened in real life. It was a unique time, especially to be a creative person trying to start this new business because you’re on the cusp, really right there walking over the bridge to adulthood, and you’re about to get married, and start this business, and finish college, but at the same time, like most people that just finish college, you don’t know nearly as much as you think you do.
To be living in your old bedroom that you grew up in and having dinner with your parents for months before getting married, it was a very strange but interesting dynamic. I remember laying in bed for that time period with a lot of thoughts in my head. It was kind of the perfect time to introduce these crimes and the way they intermingled with my own life, and this horror magazine and writing stories of my own. It just seems like it was right for a good story.
HGL: With what you were just saying about not going into too much detail about turmoil of your past and describing the setting so well, I think it’s a very relatable story to a lot of people in America, especially those like me who grew up with siblings and extended family in a small town. Was that a major focus, being more relatable to the reader?
RC: Initially, the book was called The Boogeyman: A True Story of Small-Town People, or Small-Town Terror, I can’t remember which one. I wanted to Blair Witch the audience. There was no afterword, no disclaimer, I wanted to present it as it was. I had plans to plant fake newspaper articles and create a fake website. I talked to my son about the idea of doing a documentary on the crimes as if it was real and releasing that. When Simon & Schuster bought it, they nixed that idea really quickly, but before that, it was my son who was expressing worries. He was like, “You can’t do that. You’re going to drive the property value down in Edgewood and you’re going to scare people.” I told him that this was such a personal and small story, and I didn’t know whether 50 people would read it, or if a publisher was even going to want it. I was even thinking about doing it as a limited-edition where only 500 people would read it, so I wasn’t worried about it, but the point is, it was so personal and was kind of like a campfire story that I was telling about my beloved hometown, and I didn’t know if it would connect with an audience.
What I found when the early reviews started coming, and getting direct feedback from readers, was a wonderful surprise. I was like, “You know what Rich? You should be smarter than that. You weren’t just writing your own memories, you were writing down shared memories from a bunch of people who grew up in the same small towns, or wish they grew up in those towns.” I can’t tell you how many people were like, “Oh my god, it was like looking in a mirror, reading about my childhood. We threw crabapples at cars, we jumped ramps, climbed drainpipes to the top of gas stations, and all that stuff.” That was probably my biggest surprise and sense of satisfaction, is that it made people happy to read these things. I didn’t do it on purpose to be relatable, I just wanted the real me out there. Trust me, you go on Facebook, and read the comments and they’re like, “This is the best book of the year,” “Best book of the Summer,” “This book is horrible,” “This book is so boring, all the author did was blabber on about himself for the first 25 pages,” and I don’t blame them for saying that because I did, but when the bad stuff started happening to the town and the main character, I wanted you to have a sense of both of those things.
HGL: I think that most people that read, specifically these types of books, are very much interested in the setting and character developments that are prevalent in stories by people like you, Stephen King, or Dan Simmons. I think you hit a home run there.
RC: I agree, it’s just interesting because I didn’t even tell my agent. I was supposed to be writing a different book and didn’t tell her because I was having so much fun, and it came pretty quickly. I remember sending her the e-mail saying, “Hey, I wrote a novel, it’s in true crime format, it’s got 50-plus pictures, and I’m the main character,” and she’s like, “What? Say all that again?”
HGL: Was there a particular case you studied to get into the mind of the Boogeyman?
RC: No, I read a bunch. I was preparing to write the book without knowing I was. I’ve heard other writers say this, so I know it’s cliché, but it didn’t feel so much like I was writing or creating the story as I was just uncovering it. It was kind of there already. I did study a couple local cases when it came to the ending of the book, that came from two real-life cases. I just had someone ask me on Facebook, “Did you have the Volkswagen Bug in front of the 7/11 as a nod to Ted Bundy?”, and I’m thinking to myself that yes, it was. My oldest sister had a Bug, but it’s always one of those things I remember from reading about Bundy, how he drove around in this innocent looking VW Bug pretending to be a cop, for God’s sake.
HGL: Are you expecting Chasing the Boogeyman to be picked up by a streaming service or film company?
RC: Yeah, since it hit the NYT list and gotten good reviews, there’s definitely been a lot of interest, and I just saw a really cool storybook on it the other day by a director and a producer. I think it will be optioned, and who knows after that, but I do think a movie deal will happen sooner than later.
HGL: Are there any future endeavors you want people to be on the lookout for?
RC: Mainly just Gwendy’s Final Task will be out in February in hardcover, and then in the summer in paperback from Gallery. There are whispers and hints of a Boogeyman sequel coming, because I purposely left certain things open-ended, and I did that because that’s how real-life is. Everything doesn’t get neatly tied up with a bow, especially with these kinds of crimes. I think I was subconsciously leaving the door open for me to answer some of those questions myself. Probably about a month ago, I woke up one morning with what I think is the perfect first chapter to a sequel, with a punch to the gut to tell you what’s been going on in my life, modern day, two years after the first book ended. That’s a book I really want to write, and hopefully they’ll be as enthusiastic about letting me write it.
Horror Geek Life thanks Richard Chizmar for his time, and his NYT best-seller, Chasing the Boogeyman is now available at all major book retailers. Find Richard on Twitter @RichardChizmar and Instagram @richard_chizmar.
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