Stephen Chbosky · Imaginary Friend

Author: Stephen Chbosky
Title: Imaginary Friend
Year of publication: 2019
Page count: 720
Rating: ★★

When I was a teenager, The Perks of Being a Wallflower was all the rage, and it had such a profound impact on me at the time that I got a quote from it tattooed on my ribs. So, naturally, I was going to check out Chbosky’s sophomore effort, released twenty years after his cult debut… but I did not expect it to be a horror novel.

“A nightmare is nothing but a dream gone sick.”

I approached it with some apprehension, but it didn’t take him long to reel me in: A single mother takes her seven-year-old son Christopher and flees an abusive relationship in the middle of the night, settling in a small community in Pennsylvania, as far off the beaten track as she can get. A fresh start in a perfect place—until Christopher disappears in the woods for six whole days, and comes back unharmed, but with a new voice in his head, telling him what he needs to do in order to prevent the end of the world.

The first third of Imaginary Friend was fantastic. It made you care for the ever-growing cast of characters, and itch to find out just what exactly is going on in the woods at the edge of this small town in the middle of nowhere. It reminded me of Stephen King at the height of his career in so many ways: The writing style, the group of kids, the adult relationships, the small town setting, the supernatural slowly bleeding into reality, the good VS evil show-down. Honestly, the similarities were so uncanny, if they’d slapped Stephen King’s name on the cover, I would’ve swallowed it hook, line, and sinker, and I mean it in the best possible way. It had the same brand of creepiness that I love—the sort that quite literally creeps up on you from behind.

“We can swallow our fear or let our fear swallow us.”

And then, somewhere, somehow, things started going horribly wrong. To stay with the Stephen King comparison… this could’ve come out of his cocaine phase that produced most of his turds. It wasn’t just the fact that this clearly would’ve needed a better editor (it’s hard to stay suspenseful over so many pages, and the middle section in particular could’ve been trimmed down lots), but the pacing of the story was so very off, and the direction Chbosky chose to take it in went completely off the rails, and not in a good way. The book feels like it should climax about a third-to-halfway through… but then it just keeps on going. And going. And going. Whatever creepy feeling he had invoked in me fled and ran off into the woods, to be with the deer and white plastic bags.

The twist wasn’t much of a twist to me, because I was suspicious from the very beginning, but I’ll give him that it was well-executed. But as the story unfolded it just went into a much too bizarre, abstract, and very Christian direction for me. The latter is something I can quite appreciate when it’s done subtly, but this was ridiculously over the top, and the author beats the reader over the head with his belief system. The climax at the end was also sheer overkill, it feels never-ending, and you could tell that Chbosky’s main career is that of a screenplay-writer—it reads as if he already had the movie scenes in mind when he thought it out: It’s one adrenaline-laden, action-packed sequence after another. If they adapt it into a movie, it’ll probably work much better in that format.

I did love the characters (Katie and Ambrose were big favorites), and the care that went into their backstories and relationships. Up until the point when the plot started going nuts, this was an utterly immersive novel, and had he spun it differently, it could’ve been a truly stellar book. As it is, the pay-off to this tome was an utter let-down, and I am left baffled as to how a book that started out so promisingly could go so steeply and steadily downhill, turning into such a long-winded, disappointing mess.