Boogeyman Books in Order

Richard T. Chizmar’s Boogeyman books blend the feel of true crime with the freedom of horror fiction. The series is told through a fictionalized version of Chizmar himself, which gives it a deliberately unsettling question from the start: how much should readers trust a story that looks so much like a personal record?

Begin with Chasing the Boogeyman.

The first book takes readers to a small Maryland town in the summer of 1988. A young Richard Chizmar has recently finished college and is trying to plan a future with his fiancée while also dreaming of a writing career. Then local girls begin to disappear and turn up murdered. Curfews, rumors, police activity, and neighborhood suspicion transform a place that once felt safe.

The killer is known as the Boogeyman, and the novel follows Richard’s growing involvement in the investigation. It uses photographs, documents, and true-crime-style material to make the account feel uncomfortably immediate. Yet it is still fiction, and that tension between memoir, crime narrative, and supernatural suggestion is where much of the series’ unease comes from.

In Becoming the Boogeyman, time has passed, but the danger has not faded. Richard is now an established writer and the one person the imprisoned Joshua Gallagher, the man called the Boogeyman, will speak to. The book looks at what happens when a violent past becomes part of someone’s public identity, and when the people closest to a case can never fully step away from it.

The past has a long reach.

Killing the Boogeyman continues the story as the threat returns to Richard’s life and the old nightmare takes on a new shape. The series grows larger in scale, but it keeps returning to the emotional center established in the first novel: a hometown, a family, and memories that cannot stay buried.

These books are best read in order. The individual mysteries matter, but so do the changes in Richard’s relationships and the accumulating fallout from the original murders. Readers should expect a mix of small-town nostalgia, police-procedural tension, metafiction, and dark horror. The style is less about sudden monsters than the slow realization that evil may have been close by all along.