“The Boogey Man” Guest Post from author Spencer Seidel

About the Book

Late one night out on the Eastern Promenade Trail in Portland, Maine, the police discover an incoherent teenager sitting in a pool of blood, holding the body of his best friend and the murder weapon. The girl they both love has been missing for weeks.

The kid’s jealousy clearly drove him to murder. He says the missing girl is the love of his life. She also happens to be the girlfriend of the murder victim.

It’s an open and shut case, or so most of Portland thinks.

Dr. Lisa Boyers, forensic psychologist, receives a call from an old friend, a connection to her troubled past. Attorney Rudy Swaner wants her to interview the young killer Paul Ducharme, who is claiming he doesn’t remember the events leading up to the murder.

In her jailhouse interviews, Lisa helps Paul to recover his memories. But something about Paul’s disturbing love story shakes Lisa to the very core of her being. To understand Paul, she is forced to confront her own ugly violent secrets.

Media attention mounts. Reporters stream into Portland. All eyes turn to the psychologist who seems intent on exonerating the vicious teen killer. Soon Lisa finds herself the focus of an over-zealous reporter with a knack for digging up dirty secrets.

But the killer who has Lisa in the crosshairs already knows them all.

The Boogey Man

Do you remember the first book that deeply scared the living crap out of you? I sure do. I started reading scary fiction when I was about thirteen years old. I think the first was Christine by Stephen King. You’d think that would have done the trick. It was a creepy book, one of his creepiest. But his stuff never scares me. It fascinates me and delights me, but does it scare me? Not so much. Same goes for Dean Koontz, Bentley Little, and on and on. Fiction just doesn’t creep me out. Except in one case. I’ll get to that in a minute. No, what scares me are real people and real events. Bad people doing bad things. Like Charlie Manson and his gang of creeps. When I first started thinking about this post, I was tempted to pick the book Helter Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi. That book terrified me when I was in high school. There was something truly horrifying about the Tate and LaBianca murders and the disgusting amalgam of sex and violence that poisoned the minds of all who followed Manson. High up on the list for the same reason was a book about Ted Bundy I’d read once. It might have been The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule. One theme that (mostly unintentionally) appears frequently in my writing is secrets. Everyone keeps their secrets–perhaps you have an odd fetish or pick your nose or can’t resist smelling your own BO like that character on Saturday Night Live. Usually, these little quirks are harmless. But sometimes they’re not. What if your boyfriend’s little secret is that he has a growing fascination with the idea of raping and killing women of a certain type? That’s a truly terrifying concept to me. Worse is that it actually happened! The scariest book I ever mostly read–I didn’t finish it–was called Hunting Humans. I don’t know who wrote it, and I’d bet that it’s no longer in print. I found it in a bookstore I used to frequent in Washington, DC when I was in college. From what I remember, it was basically a graphic accounting of the deeds of various serial killers, complete with crime-scene photos. I remember reading the first few chapters and realizing that I’d scared myself silly, perhaps irreversibly. Reading it made me feel ugly and dirty. On a one-off basis and certainly in fiction, I can handle reading about a serial killer. But this book just hit me over the head with it again and again and again and jostled some previously suppressed nugget of terror loose in my mind. A few minutes after putting it down and trying desperately to distract myself with something else, I realized that I didn’t even want it in my room. It had that much power over me. I threw it away. There was one crime-scene photo in particular that haunts me to this day–suffice it to say, it was a picture of a man shot in the head. Like Forrest Gump says, “That’s all I have to say about that.” I guess I should give honorable mention here to one piece of what must be about 99% fiction: The Amityville Horror. A controversial book, it is nonetheless responsible for my enduring phobia of old houses. Those glowing red window/eyes… Ack!

About the Author

Spencer Seidel’s love of reading and writing began as a child after he discovered Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. His first novel, Dead of Wynter, was published in 2011 and was well-received by critics and readers alike. When he’s not writing novels, Spencer enjoys playing loud rock guitar, something he’s been doing for over twenty-five years