Chasing the Boogeyman

by Richard Chizmar

I took Chasing the Boogeyman with me when we left. I guess that’s stealing, but I reasoned this was a better fate for the book than holding up the corner of a dining room table.

When a monster is finally caught against all odds, it feels like magic. The author J. R. R. Tolkien had a word for that feeling—eucatastrophe.

There is a John Milton quote that I think of often while driving the streets of my hometown: “Innocence, once lost, can never be regained. Darkness, once gazed upon, can never be lost.”

He stood up from the bed, glancing at the ’Salem’s Lot poster again. “I don’t know how you can sleep with that thing in here. That is one nasty-looking zombie.” “Jesus, Dad,” I said, feigning outrage. “That’s a vampire.”

I could just make out the dark silhouette of my father hunched over the narrow table in the corner of the kitchen. He looked small, somehow, and lonely sitting there by himself. The house was silent and still, and I flashed back in time to hundreds of other early mornings just like this one. Standing there in my pajamas, I thought: This is what you do when you have a family. You get up when it’s still dark outside and you go to work so the people you love can have a better life. Even when you’re sick or tired and don’t want to. I watched him for a while longer, my heart aching in a way I’d never felt before. “Love you, Dad,” I whispered in the darkness,

Of all the breathtaking passages of lyrical wonder that Ray Bradbury has gifted readers with during his lifetime, those eleven words from the opening of his seminal novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes, may very well be my favorite. Bradbury goes on to describe a mythical landscape, an October Country, where Autumn is King and Mischief is Queen and anything is possible. The good, bad, miraculous, and unimaginable—it’s all right there, waiting for you in the month of October, hovering just beyond the reach of your fingertips.