Stephen ChboskyLiterary Fiction · Young Adult·b. 1970
Imaginary Friend
Synopsis
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.
How it reads
- “Don’t leave the street, they can’t get you it you don’t leave the street.” Christopher and his mother have just moved to a small town, escaping from their past. Young Christopher starts at a new school and is waiting for his mother to pick him up when he is mysteriously being called into the woods. Upon investigating, Christopher gets lost in the woods for 6 days with no recollection of any of it, just the knowledge that something terrible is going to happen to the town and he is the only one who can stop it. Ok I really loved this book. Like, really, really loved it.... at first. I listened to the audio which I found to be so compelling. I finished this 700 page book within 3 days. It genuinely was scary, especially listening to the audio. It touched on a type of horror that would give anyone the chills. I know, everyone that writes a horror has gained inspiration from the King himself, but I couldn’t help but feel like I was reading a Stephen King novel! I drew too many comparisons to not think otherwise. I must say, it was a lot easier to read and very well done. I really loved Christopher and his mother and was genuinely worried for them throughout the book. I’m going to put a lot of what I thought into a blog post, because it isn’t long enough to fit in here but I wasn’t surprised by the theme reveal at the end, I could see it coming but maybe that’s what happens after reading similar stories by SK. I was a little let down towards the end and felt like it super dragged for a while. I think I need to think on it more but I know it didn’t need to be 700 pages long. I’m still rating it 4 stars as the writing was truly mesmerising, the characters were amazing and the story was addicting. Think along the lines of, Freddy Kruger meet Stranger Things meet IT meet The Stand! I know that any time I get a tickle on my ear or my neck or absent mindly scratch myself I’m going to think it could be any of these “imaginary friends”
- Rating: somewhere between 2 and 3 out of 5. The reason I can't make up my mind between 2 and 3 stars is that I absolutely despised some parts and loved some other (earlier) parts. And since i cannot give half stars here, I've decided on the lower score for now. The second half of the book was Hell. Literally. The story started off really well. It was interesting, it was new but with some strong King vibes. I liked it and it had me hooked on for a while. But at some point, I'm not sure exactly where but it must've been around the 50% mark, I totally lost interest. It just started to get boring, repetitive. It was when the pov started to switch between characters to show how they're manipulated that things started to go downhill. I understand the point of doing that of course, but some of the characters' stories were so similar (specially Eddies and the twins) that I sometimes confused them. Plus, I don't think it was that significant to show every single side character's story. This made the story too long, unnecessarily long. I guess some of the repetitiveness and the length of the story served the purpose and the main concept of the story because that's what those people in the imaginary side were going through, but as a reader, it was like torture to me and literally made me think "Please, stop it". I wasn't a huge fan of the ending either. I could understand one of the characters being this excessively religious person (and I totally didn't mind it), but to suddenly give that religious overtone to the whole story towards the end to explain the morale of the story bugged me.
- !!!!!<br>no thoughts, head empty. I'll thunk about it and then i'll write a proper review, because my mind is still progressing everything that's happened.