Month: October 2023

Chasing the Boogeyman by Richard Chizmar

 

This book is a true crime horror story, or is it? I picked this book up because I thought it was horror fiction. However, as I began reading it, I wondered if I had inadvertently picked up a true-crime tale. The book contains a foreword by true-crime writer James Renner, which sets up the idea in the reader’s mind that this is not fiction. The book also includes photographs of people and locations involved in the case. Even after I had finished reading it, I was still questioning the genre. The writing is that convincing.

Richard Chizmar supposedly tells the true story of a serial killer in his hometown in writing that reads like part documentary and part memoir.

A serial killer is mutilating young girls and leaves few clues. The town becomes afraid as more murders happen while the police aren’t able to find the killer.

Written like an autobiography, the author narrates how, after he graduated college and moved back in with his parents, he became interested in trying to solve the murders. He works with a journalist friend, and they do a little unauthorized snooping. The story feels personal as the narrator talks about growing up in this small town and seeing people he’s known most of his life. Filled with flashbacks from the narrator’s youth, the murder mystery gets lost in the small-town slice-of-life tale.

The writing style is unique and so well written in the true-crime genre that I still don’t want to believe it was fiction.

On a rating scale where one is ‘just don’t bother with it’ and five is ‘this will change your life,’ I give this book a three. Although it was compelling, it didn’t make me want to drop everything and read it, which is what five demands and it wasn’t suspenseful enough that I thought about it when I wasn’t reading it. So, it gets a three.

 

Summer Sons by Lee Manedelo

Although the coroner has ruled his adopted brother’s death a suicide, Andrew doesn’t believe it and seeks to find the truth about how Eddie died.

I’ve seen that literary trope so often that it doesn’t interest me anymore. However, this book has so much more to offer. There’s the gothic atmosphere, street car racing, academic stress, a throbbing uncurrent of sexuality, and a revenant that haunts people instead of houses.

In the opening chapter, the haunt (used here as a noun to represent the ghost or spirit or whatever you wish to call it) comes when Andrew is sitting in the driver’s seat of Eddie’s car. Andrew scrambles into the passenger seat to get away from it. The spirit then “…lifted a hand from the wheel to reach for him, uncanny as a marionette; searing cold fingertips tapped the tattooed bone of his wrist.” Bonded by a horrific experience when they were teenagers, Eddie continues to reach out to Andrew from beyond the grave.

Visitations from the haunt fill the book. Andrew struggles to understand messages from the spirit while also trying to investigate Eddie’s death. Andrew becomes roommates with Eddie’s roommate, moves into Eddie’s bedroom, and begins taking graduate-level courses at the university where Eddie studied. He believes that getting close to Eddie’s friends and academic advisors will help him understand how Eddie died. Eddie had been working on a research project that involved interviewing people in this Southern community about ghosts and hauntings they’ve experienced. Andrew picks up where Eddie’s research left off and finds himself “Running straight into the mouth of danger after it found him and invited him along for a ride.” Andrew tries to continue his graduate studies, but his obsession with discovering how Eddie dies prevents him from getting very far. He makes friends with Eddie’s friends, using Eddie’s muscle car to engage in street races and participating in hot, steamy, sweaty parties with plenty of alcohol, drugs, and sexual energy.

Andrew experiences a sort of re-coming of age. He loses his illusions about love, academics, and the spirit world and begins to comprehend things he never thought possible.

Summer Sons is a literary horror. The writing is beautiful and evocative, with an elevation of prose not often found in horror fiction. It requires slow reading, periods in which the reader can take the time to sink into the words, while the plot simmers in a slow burn, igniting a more conventional horror story climax. In addition to being a horror story, it is a mystery in the classic who-done-it genre and a vibrant tale of love and grief.

Mandelo combines the horror of haunting with the emotional battleground of academia and the angst of twenty-somethings struggling to become adults. They have earned a fan who will eagerly await their next book.

Ranking: Invest the time to read this book because it’s worth it.