Amigo imaginario

Twenty years after The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky returned with a very different book: a sprawling, nerve-shredding work of psychological and supernatural horror. Kate Reese, fleeing an abusive relationship after her husband's death, arrives in the small town of Mill Grove, Pennsylvania, hoping to give her seven-year-old son Christopher a fresh start.

Soon after they settle in, Christopher begins hearing a voice in the clouds that draws him into the Mission Street Woods. He vanishes for six days. When he reappears -- unharmed but changed -- he carries a compulsion and a warning: he must build a treehouse in those woods before Christmas, or something terrible will befall everyone in town. As Christmas nears, the boundary between an idyllic town and a lurking evil begins to dissolve, and the whole community is pulled toward a reckoning.

At more than seven hundred pages, Imaginary Friend is a deliberately immersive epic that channels the everyday-Americana dread of early Stephen King while pursuing Chbosky's own preoccupations: childhood, motherhood, faith, and the thin membrane between innocence and terror. Widely praised as a Top 10 book of 2019, it is a demanding, atmospheric descent into a nightmare hiding beneath small-town calm.