Author (and Stephen King collaborator) Richard Chizmar writes horror novels that celebrate life

When Richard Chizmar was 10 years old, he wrote a story about a snowman who couldn’t melt. The thermometer climbed, and the sun blazed, but the snowman remained standing, watching his once hard-packed buddies dissolve into slush.

“He was so lonely,” Chizmar recalled and grinned. “I always saw the world differently than the other people around me. Even then, I was exploring the dark side.”

Now, the Bel Air resident is an acclaimed author who has penned six novels including four bestsellers. Two were co-written with horror icon Stephen King, who praises Chizmar’s “really interesting, innovative ideas.”

Chizmar has co-authored screenplays for the big and small screen, including one episode of Showtime’s “Masters of Horror” anthology series, and two episodes of NBC’s “Fear Itself.”

What’s more, the horror magazine-turned-publishing company founded by Chizmar when he was a senior at the University of Maryland is thriving. Cemetery Dance Publications, now in its 36th year, has published a roster of A-list authors from Ray Bradbury to William Peter Blatty of “The Exorcist” fame.

Even Chizmar’s personal life is rosy.

He’s still married to Kara, the green-eyed girl he fell in love with as a kid. His seventh novel, “Memorials,” will be published in October, one month after the couple’s eldest son, Billy, releases his debut novel, “Them.” The second and youngest son in the family, Noah, is a star lacrosse player at the University of Virginia, where he has displayed a toughness on the field that has been praised by Sports Illustrated.

So life for the 58-year-old Chizmar is looking pretty, well, sunny.

“When my friends finally started reading my work, they’re like, ‘Rich, where does this all this solemn stuff come from?'” he recalled.

“A bookseller in New Hampshire who got an advance copy of my new novel, “Memorials,” messaged me yesterday and said, ‘I’ve had nightmares two nights in a row. You’re going to mess people up.'”

An expression of pure joy crossed Chizmar’s face.

“I just loved that,” he said. “I told her, ‘I can do no better, unless I can make people cry.'”

He knows that an awful lot of people crave being scared out of their wits, though exactly how that mechanism works remains mysterious. What is it about feeling bad that makes some people feel so good?

Behavioral scientist Haiyang Yang, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins University’s Carey Business School, speculated in a university blog post last fall that fans of horror and suspense are unusually self-assured. People who flock to scary movies are confident they can overcome the obstacles fate throws in their paths, he wrote — a description that fits Chizmar like the cover of a book.

“When we first began publishing the magazine, I would go out to the newspaper box in front of my apartment building at 1 a.m.,” Chizmar said.

“I knew that by that time, no one was going to buy what was left. I would plunk a quarter into the box and take out all the newspapers and use them to pack up the books. We shipped them in boxes we found in dumpsters. I remember thinking, ‘Can you imagine being successful enough to buy boxes to pack your products in?'”

Chizmar and King have known each other professionally since 1989. At the time, King had been famous for nearly two decades, and when he sent Chizmar a signed promotional blurb for the fledgling “Cemetery Dance” magazine, it pretty much guaranteed that the new publisher could continue paying his bills for at least the next few months.

Over time, and after thousands of text exchanges and good-natured jibes about the rising and falling fortunes of the Baltimore Orioles and Boston Red Sox, King became familiar with the younger man’s fiction. And when he found himself facing writer’s block, he turned to Chizmar for help.

The result was “Gwendy’s Button Box,” the first novel of a trilogy. The first and last books were written jointly by the two authors, while the second was penned by Chizmar alone.

“Rich basically bailed me out,” King said.

“He has a good feel for suburban life, for middle-class Baltimore and its backyard barbecues and the room in the basement where the kids hang out. I would call what he does ‘middle-class fantasy horror make-believe, with a kind of ‘Twilight Zone’ feel.'”

Even when Chizmar was growing up in Harford County, the youngest of five children of an airman who worked on the Aberdeen Proving Ground and an Ecuadorian homemaker, he was possessed of a keen sense that the best moments in life are fleeting.

He remembers one time in particular when that revelation struck him hard.

“I was about 14,” he recalled. “We had been sledding, but all my friends had gone home. It was dusk and the snow was falling and the lights were glowing. I could see my house off in the distance. I thought, ‘Nothing is ever going to be the same after this. We’re all growing up. People are going to leave, and some of us are never coming back.'”

That’s the moment that made Chizmar a writer.

“I am the one who is cursed and blessed to remember everything,” he said. “It helps to put it down on paper. I became a writer to help people make sense of the world.”

Perhaps. But it also seems likely that Chizmar became a horror writer because he likes to surprise people and make them laugh. His acute sense of life’s darker moments is paired with an equally well-developed mischievous streak.

A case in point are his two cinema-verite books, “Chasing the Boogeyman” and “Becoming the Boogeyman,” in which Chizmar goes to great lengths to trick his readers into thinking they’re reading a memoir instead of a novel.

The books are narrated by a young man named Richard Chizmar who moved back home with his parents to save money for his upcoming wedding — all details pulled from the author’s life. The books mix historic events, including a real-life criminal known in the 1980s as the Phantom Fondler, with a made-up serial killer.

The novel even includes black-and-white photos purporting to show the “killer” being handcuffed by police officers. In reality, the murderer and cops were costumed actors, and Chizmar took the photos himself.

“I’m just a big kid,” he admitted.

That turned out to be a very good thing. The author’s innate playfulness has helped him cope with occasional but genuine hardships, including his encounter at age 29 with a real-lifeserial killer: testicular cancer.

“After I was diagnosed, I had two operations,” Chizmar said. “And then my doctors declared me clear. They said there was a 99% chance the cancer would never come back.”

But six months later, Chizmar went to the emergency room after he found himself once again in great pain.

“My poor doctor had to tell me the cancer had spread to both lungs, my liver, my stomach and my lymph nodes,” he said. “I was given a 50% chance of survival.”

And still, the snowman refused to melt.

“I said, ‘If anyone can beat this, it will be me,” Chizmar recalled. “I told my doctors, ‘Tell me what to do, and I will do it better than any patient you have ever had.'”

As he had vowed that he would, Chizmar recovered fully. But even as he and Kara rejoiced, they were hit with another setback.

“After 12 weeks of chemotherapy, the doctors told us that so much poison was being shot into my body that we would not be able to have children the natural way,” he said.”But five years later, there came Billy. And four years after that, there came Noah. I wake up grateful every day.”

More than most of us, Chizmar knows how easily human existence can be snuffed out. But instead of frightening him, he views that painful reality as a cause for celebration.

“Life is fragile, but I’m an optimist,” he said, and then segued into a related thought:

“People tell me that the good thing about my stories is that they always contain a ray of hope.”