User Reviews
Rating: really liked it
I was so afraid of my contact lens numbers were going to be bigger than my irises after I finished this book (Give me a biggest Chardonnay break, my dear friends, this month I read “Institution”, “Gold Finch” and still working on “Priory of Orange Tree” which has also 800 pages. My red eyed image is still giving creeps to neighborhood kids and their mothers which is fine with me, I can eat trick or treat candies I’ve bough to serve them and I could also steal their M&M- only the red ones, they can have the others-)
I read too many bad reviews which gave me a little hesitation at first but come on, we’re talking about “Perks of Being a Wallflower” author! And horror is one of my favorite genre ( Before I got my caffeine intake in the mornings I look like Frakenstein’s bride with my all my hair in the air and raccoon eye make-up style so I get used to love horrific things )) Of course I was all in! I said bring it on this terrifying read. At least if I got bored, I could use it as dumbbell like I did with My KING’s “Stand” book. (Don’t get me wrong I love that book but after finishing it, I was looking like Dwayne Johnson’s big sister with my humongous biceps! My husband used them as pillows to rest his head and take quick naps!)
I can feel for the readers’ disappointment or frustration because of changing of writing, story-telling method of the author and focusing on different genre.
I actually confused too many times during my read and turned the cover to make sure that I was having the right writer’s book. Was I reading the right STEPHEN’s book? Was it not KING’s book, right? It is Chbosky book. I actually thought both authors were pulling a prank and at the end of the novel we could find an acknowledgment part confessing my KING pushed Chbosky away from his seat and started to touch the key pad like playing a horrific theme from Phantom of the Opera and wrote this book.
I mostly enjoy the writing even it was soooo looonnnggg and I dropped my dried contact lenses into my wine glasses and coffee mugs (of course drink choices changing daily and nightly!) and when I was multitasking like biting a scone and flipping the pages, I may have consumed some book pages as well and feeding my dogs with scone (they somersaulted and danced all day, like dogs like owners!)
But Christopher’s age is a little concerned me. At least he could be around 10- 12, maybe this age is a little old to have an imaginary friend but his age is too young to endure and fight against all those scary and haunted things he’d met. It hurt me to see him suffer too many times. (I was thinking I couldn’t see anything disturbing like Joker movie but those parts of the book really agitated me as well)
And the good and evil’s never ending fight, all those biblical references, the parts about the way of people’s atonement of their sins were too compelling subjects in this young and innocent child’s world.
I think with omitted parts ( especially the last parts of the book were too long and they kept repeat themselves) and a simpler boy and his imaginary friend’s story not about heavy biblical subjects, but a story about a boy’s loneliness and naivety to imagine wrong kind of best friend would work better for me!
But as a summary, my 3 point 5 stars eventually rounded up to 4 because I love spooky, haunted, nail biter, dark stories and I enjoyed most part of the book. It’s a thrilling, entertaining but also exhausting reading. I hope I don’t scream too much in my sleep this night (Don’t worry, this book didn’t scare me like that but my husband learned to imitate Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker laughter and as soon as I close my eyes at night, he performs very same laughter in the silence of the night like a heartless creature. So this month I decided to read more horror books because real life and vengeful husbands who were dissatisfied with my cooking performance were scarier than the books! Trust me! I learned from the hardest way!)
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Rating: really liked it
This started off really strong, but I gotta be honest with you all: I completely stopped giving a shit about this at about the 65% mark. This book was just way too long with not enough pay off. The biggest meh.
Rating: really liked it
Not to self: stop reading horror books with kids.
Rating: really liked it
This morning I FINALLY managed to finish Imaginary Friend. I started this book and was immediately hooked. It was uber creepy, really well written, I was loving it.
Sadly it was all downhill from there. 700+ pages of which maybe half ended up being relevant/adding to the story. Now I love a tome. I recently read Wanderers which was longer than this one but had zero wasted scenes or words and was an epic that read fast. So it's not the length itself that was an issue. I read King and Tolstoy. Trust me I can cope with a long narrative that you need to commit to.
It was the slogging through endless pages of repetitive nonsense, towards a pay off that irritated me, didn't really make sense and subjectively wasn't worth the effort. It was the eventual realisation that this was one long sermon from which I am supposed to learn something (And boy does the author ram that down your throat ad finitum for the last 20%) It was basically (In my opinion) the author plugging his belief system but disguising it as a horror story. Well you know what you can do with THAT shenanigans.
Too long. Way too long. Even allowing for my very personal reaction to what this book was, and allowing that quite rightly for some readers this novel will resonate in a different way , I honestly believe it needs a HUGE edit. There's so much white noise the plot, the "message" whether that message appeals to you or not, gets lost along the way. It's probably in the woods with about a million deer and a few white plastic bags.
You had to be there. But I really can't recommend it.
Rating: really liked it
Y’all are fools.
This 3.54 star rating? It’s all a lie.
5 BIG ASS STARS If A Nightmare on Elm Street and Coraline had a baby together: Imaginary Friend.
Rating: really liked it
Now available as a BOTM add on starting in October!Long ago, books stopped terrifying me in the way that people search out from the likes of gory, graphic horror films. Somewhere upon entering adulthood, the paranormal took a backseat to the chills provided by child abuse, sexual assault, and the murder of members of minority groups who never gain an ounce of justice, but this book terrified me in ways that I haven't experienced in over a decade, mainly due to combining paranormal AND realistic horror. I'll go into more detail at the end, complete with spoiler tags, but this book contained the one horror element that still manages to give me nightmares, no matter how many times I read a book that includes it. If you want to go into Imaginary Friend completely blind, I recommend stopping here, and not reading anything else surrounding the story until you've had a chance to pick it up for yourself. If you're the type of reader, like me, who enjoys knowing a bit more about a cryptically vague book to see if you're compatible with it, keep going. Either way, please take my thoughts lightly as the cause behind the commotion in this novel will be very polarizing, and most folks will love it or hate it.
"Don't leave the street. They can't get you if you don't leave the street."The most common question I've received surrounding this novel is about the page length. "Was it really necessary for the story to be over 700 pages long? Who does this guy think he is, Stephen King?" Honestly? Yes. I had my doubts going in, but I almost immediately found myself entranced by the author's writing, and what would be described as a slow burning introduction to our characters became an unputdownable saga. There's a reason why Chbosky is a bestselling author, and while he did wait almost 2 decades to publish his second novel, it shows his incredible range of storytelling capabilities and otherworldly talent. The average rating is considerably lower than most popular books on Goodreads at the time of this writing, but I do think the page length is something that is possibly affecting this. If you're the type of reader that doesn't enjoy a meaty doorstop, you probably won't appreciate what this book has to offer. The page count will be a dealbreaker for about half of the readers out there, and that's ok, big books aren't for everyone. If you're still with me, let's continue on.
"Oh please don't let it be the hissing lady. Please don't let me be asleep."While I hate comparing authors' various works amongst each other, I think it's helpful to note why this book is being pitched to fans of Stephen King and his older horror novels. This book appears to be set in the 90's, and it very strongly has the "kids battle evil entity" vibe that is so prevalent in many of King's past bestsellers, which automatically appealed to me. The beginning has a similar feel where, we get many details into a multitude of characters' lives, and after the foundation is set, the creepy instances start. It begins slowly, and almost seems to tip-toe around the horror aspect until well into the book, but it is beautifully done so. As a reader, I became invested in Kate and Christopher as humans, and the bond they created through shared experiences with poverty, abuse, and trauma was so necessary in transforming Imaginary Friend from a B-rated horror romp into a full scale terrifying masterpiece.
"Hisssssss. Hisssssss."Alright, here's the meat of it. I'm going to put this next paragraph in a spoiler tag, and while there are no specific spoilers, I do discuss the theme of the reveal, and I don't want this to affect those readers wishing to go in blind. (view spoiler)
[Bottom line? This is what I like to refer to as religious horror. Sure, it's very much fictionalized, and stretches the canon of good-vs-evil/heaven-vs-hell quite a bit, but it should be noted that I did not feel that this book was preachy; if anything, the author chose to use these themes in a way that is meant for nothing but sheer entertainment value. I mention it because this form of storytelling may be received as sacrilegious or offensive to some religious groups. (hide spoiler)] This part was so well done, for me personally, because I saw the initial reveal coming (the who not the what), and I was still found myself astonished once it finally came.
There is so much more detail I could go into, but I'd rather let you experience Imaginary Friend for yourself. This book would make a fantastic bookclub pick for groups who enjoy darker reads, as there is so much to be taken away from this. Beyond the horror aspect, there are so many themes surrounding sacrifice, hope, and love that will appeal to parents, caregivers, and members of small communities. While I found myself with questions after finishing, that was ok, because I enjoy when a book makes me think long past the turning of the final page. Imaginary Friend will rank amongst the most unique and memorable books I've ever read, and you can be sure I'll never forget it.
Also, reader? Make sure you keep the lights on while devouring this book. If you fall asleep, you never know what may creep into your nightmares.*Many thanks to the publisher for providing my review copy.
Rating: really liked it
how in the world did stephen chbosky go from writing
'we accept the love we think we deserve' to an entire book dedicated to a child haunted by horrifying imaginary people?!
i guess 20 years between books is enough time for an author to change. and in this case, 20 years to plan stephen kings demise. because holy crap. this is the creepiest thing ive ever read, in the most bizarre way possible.
this actually reminded me a lot of
‘stranger things’ - strange things happen, its a little spooky and im not sure i entirely understand everything or if i even like it, but it is ever so slightly addicting.
↠ 3.5 stars
Rating: really liked it
"We can swallow our fear or let our fear swallow us."Imaginary Friend feels very much like a classic horror novel which is both a good and a bad thing. To begin with, we have a group of young kids, an unknown evil that fills them with fear and despair, a small town on the brink of chaos, and missing dead children from 50 years ago. And it is terribly creepy. When I first read The Perks of Being a Wallflower I remember feeling underwhelmed. I didn’t get why people loved this story so much. Neither writing nor plot managed to catch my interest, but maybe I wasn’t ready when I first read it. Rewatching the film years later showed me what a beautiful and moving story Chbosky had created.
But with IF I was immediately drawn into the world of Christopher who vanishes into the woods for six whole days just to turn up again unharmed, but with a desperate need to build a treehouse in the middle of the Mission Street Woods. And something else has changed: his dyslexia is gone, he is suddenly the best kid in his maths class, and he seems to know what people feel and think.
It was creepy as hell, I had goosebumps 24/7 and no clue about what was happening. Never did I think that I would devour these 700 pages in three days but that’s exactly what happened. The writing was compelling, the characters felt real, and I really needed to know what the fuck was going on or I would DIE. So far so good, but things changed around the 500-page mark. There was a big twist, which, although I didn’t see it coming, didn’t catch me unaware. Mainly because it felt too simplified and unoriginal. It wouldn’t have bothered me much, though, if the story had been taken to a clean and satisfying ending. But what followed were 200 pages that should have been 100 pages, or maybe 70. You know when there is a final battle with the biggest bully on the lot and you know this is it, it’s live or die? That didn’t only happen once, it happened three times. It wasn’t just repetitive at this point, it was a big mess. And even though I had really enjoyed – loved – the story until that point, it couldn’t hold my attention and fascination any longer.
It was made even worse by Chbosky’s use of redundant tropes that put female characters in over-sexualised and violated roles. I honestly expected better of him. Chbosky is a great storyteller who proved repeatedly that he has what it takes to tell heartfelt stories with characters that feel real, that are relatable. So why did he suddenly feel the need to make use of tropes such as the prude catholic girl tempted by sin, why did he have to degrade most of his central female characters by ripping off their clothes, violating their bodies, by turning them into madwomen haunted by unfeeling or violent men? I’m not criticising the fact that he made violence and abuse part of a female character’s story. Sadly, that is far from unrealistic. But he exploited them and used their pain for shock value like countless male authors have done before him. It’s a limited and frankly antiquated way of writing female voices.
Overall, this novel would have been a new favourite if it had paid more attention to plotting and characterisation.
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Rating: really liked it
Wow! I’ll tell you now, this won’t be everyone’s cup of tea but it was 100% up my street.
Mind bending, so incredibly clever with such beautiful and heartfelt language and messages. I’m astonished and reviewing this is gonna be bloody hard.
"He knew how he found the skeleton. He knew that the bones had been there for a long time. He even thought he knew the name of the kid who died. But he couldn't tell the grown-ups that. Because eventually, they would ask him how he knew everything. And he only had one truthful answer. 'Because my imaginary friend told me." Ok, here goes nothing. We start with Christopher, a young boy living with his mother, they struggle to get by and Christopher has a lot of trouble with letters. One day while waiting for his mother to pick him up after school he wanders into the Mission Street Woods and isn't discovered until 6 days later, completely unharmed yet with a complete memory lapse of his time there. When asked how he got out, all Christopher will say is 'the nice man helped me.'
Many years before, another young lad David Olsom also wandered into the Mission Street Woods but was never found. What happened to him?
Since returning from the woods Christopher has gained himself an imaginary friend. He does wonderful things for him, Christopher becomes a genius overnight, his mother wins the lottery, he gets a group of friends and things are looking up.
Meanwhile we follow a collection of other characters, from Christopher's school friends, his mother's ex boyfriend, a local Christian girl Mary Katherine, the Sherrif and many more. If you like books with a variety of different characters you'll like this one.
Before long Christopher is being led by his imaginary friend. A villain called the Hissing Lady is out to get Christopher, and the Nice Man is determined to protect him. The most important task is to build a tree house, it will work as a doorway between the real world and the imaginary world. But Christopher must not be in the imaginary world at night, because that is where the evil lurks.
Soon Christopher is spending more and more time in the imaginary world. While the people in the real world are suffering from some kind of sickness which is making them all crazy. Violence erupts and the world turns into utter chaos.
I won't say anymore now as it's about there when the twists start coming in. If you don't like religious allegory then maybe pass this one because it is quite prominent. Personally I loved it, and I thought the way in which Chbosky handles the different aspects of the genesis story and retells them in his own way was simply fantastic.
(view spoiler)
[It turns out the Hissing Lady is actually Eve. She offered to go to hell to try and protect people from the devil. By the end she returns to heaven which was lush. The nice man is actually Satan - such an interesting portrayal of the way he can cause people to go crazy and commit crimes., but also how terrifying this version of hell was. Where murderers are forced to stab themselves over and over. (hide spoiler)]Finally the reveal at the end was just incredible. (view spoiler)
[ Mary Katherine is a retold version of the virgin Mary, and she is expecting a child. (hide spoiler)]This entire story just has so much in it, no wonder it is 700+ pages. But honestly I believed every page was worth it.
Rating: really liked it
I'll be first to admit that I never read horror, nor do I have the interest, but I wanted to give Stephen Chbosky a try just because he was an iconic author of my teenage years. But this..... wasn't it. Even from the objective perspective of someone not into horror, especially paranormal/fantastical horror, this was a longwinded mess.
This book started out strong to trick you to read on, but the ending was catastrophically terrible. The first 25% is basically what the synopsis describes, and then afterward, the story truly begins. Let me reiterate that this book is 700 pages long and the first quarter of the book is just exposition. From 25% to 75%, this book actually had a lot of good parts. It kept me guessing, it had twists and turns, it had a few creepy partys. But then the ending just became overwritten, incomprehensible plot divided between two worlds and between a cast of 10 characters. The writing was average at best throughout the book, but the end of the book just became totally ridiculous with all the characters screaming LIKE THIS!!!! at each other multiple times a page, aNd ThE viLLaiN oF thE boOk tAlkS liKe tHis. I skim read the last 10% just in search of answers, but this book provided none. I have no idea what the conflict of the book was and why any of the villains were wreaking havoc on the world. The main plot twist at the end just made the entire situation more confusing and everything got so muddled in the end that it's making me regret spending TWO WEEKS reading this massive book only for it to be so completely a let down because the plot doesn't actually get resolved in a way that makes sense. Chbosky just kept on dragging the conflict out even though he could have ended everything 500 pages earlier, with SO much unnecessary inner monologue that dragged out the pace even more.
Maybe if you like fantastical thrillers with religious/spiritual undertones you would enjoy this more, but in my opinion, just save your time and read Stephen King or something.
Rating: really liked it
“Death is coming! Death is here! We’ll die on Christmas Day!”- Stephen Chbosky,
Imaginary Friend Holy wow.
This is a tough one to talk about.
For about 600 of this book’s 700 pages, I was fully committed and absolutely on board. I was enjoying every page of Stephen Chbosky’s
Imaginary Friend, marveling at the intricate plotting, the engaging characters, the slam-bang set-pieces, and the utter uniqueness of the premise, even as I mentally ticked off all the influences (
A Nightmare on Elm Street,
Stranger Things,
The Dead Zone, Dante’s
Inferno, the Bible…)
And then came the ending.
Imaginary Friend is like a roller coaster in a very literal sense. There are tremendous highs, astounding lows, and an extremely sudden, whiplash-inducing transition between those two poles.
The first eighty-five percent is so good, I nearly missed my train stop on the morning commute. The last fifteen percent is so bad, I felt embarrassed for the author.
Before I say anymore, a brief summary is in order.
Imaginary Friend begins with seven year-old Christopher and his mother Kate escaping from an abusive relationship. They end up in the small town of Mill Grove, Pennsylvania, which feels very close to certain Maine townships, namely Castle Rock and Derry.
At first, Christopher’s troubles are very much of this world. Fitting in at school, despite being targeted by bullies. Getting good grades, despite a learning disability. Soon, though, bigger perils intrude. Christopher goes missing in the Mission Street Woods for six days. When he is found, he cannot remember anything. There are no signs of foul play. The only evidence that he was gone is a gradual change in the fortunes of Christopher and his mother.
It turns out, though, that Christopher has come from the woods with a mission to build a treehouse by Christmas Day. I don’t think it gives away too much to say that this tree house will act as a kind of portal between worlds: the real world on one side, and the imaginary world on the other. The imaginary world is another dimension that is sort of overlaid on the real. Within this strange realm, Christopher finds himself a pawn in a cosmic war between good and evil, represented by the nice man on one side, and the hissing lady on the other.
If that sounds crazy, well I can assure you, it gets a billion times loopier.
The early-going is pure genius. When I picked up this doorstop, I figured I was in for a bit of a shaggy-dog tale, filled with digressions and authorial indulgences. What I discovered, however, is that Chbosky is not here to waste a single page, a single sentence. He writes with a Chekovian purity where even the tiniest details have meaning to the overall plot. Everything gets woven into the larger tapestry, with nothing included as simple background filler.
The characters are also excellent, and are fully revealed through time. At first, many of the people we meet are archetypes. Christopher is the precocious youngster who develops special powers. His mother is the quintessential ass-kicking single mom-cum-lioness. The sheriff moved here from a big city because he has a
haunted past. The bully at school is a rich asshole whose parents own half the town. Eventually, though, details are added to fill in the corners of their lives. While not every character gets the full 3-D treatment, almost everyone is graced with Chbosky’s abundant empathy.
But this is not an intense, inward-looking character study. There are some big action pieces, and Chbosky really impressed me with his ability to evoke panoramic scenes of mayhem. At certain points,
Imaginary Friend takes on a cinematic quality.
Chbosky also does an incredible job – up to a point – of creating the overarching system that governs the interplay between the real and imaginary worlds. In dozens of meticulous scenes, Chbosky gives you the rules and parameters of the imaginary world, and of Christopher’s role in it. Normally, a setup like this, which is completely unmoored from reality, would not interest me. To my surprise, I was more than willing to go along for the ride, mainly due to Chbosky’s skill and confidence as a storyteller.
There is even a masterfully executed twist, one good enough to have you paging back to earlier in the novel, to see how Chbosky set it up.
So far, so good.
Then we come to the ending.
I won’t spoil it for you, though I truly believe it spoils itself. Suffice to say, the complex concepts that Chbosky carefully built, brick by brick, crumble like dry sand, eventually collapsing in a needlessly drawn-out climax that exchanges the carefully-laid conventions of the imaginary world for cornpone sentiment and drive-by Christianity. The sharpness is first softened, and then overwhelmed, by a maudlin tide of emotionalism, punctuated by some inanely simplistic speechifying.
Imaginary Friend is being billed as “literary horror.” I’m not exactly sure what that is meant to convey, though I expect that the copy editor who coined the phrase assumed – wrongly – that horror and literary merit are mutually exclusive. Anyone who has ever read Stephen King knows the fallacy of that assumption. It is more accurate to say that
Imaginary Friend is what happens when the hardcore horror of King gets into a head-on, high-speed, two vehicle collision with the tooth-achy treacle churned out by Mitch Albom on a semiregular basis.
This is a novel I cannot recommend. It is, indeed, a novel I am tempted to say you should avoid. Nonetheless, I have to admit a certain lingering fascination for what Chbosky attempted. It is a failure. Yet he failed ambitiously. And if you are going to go down in flames, it might as well be spectacular.
Rating: really liked it
sUch A MaSsiVe waStE oF tiMe.
The first bit was creepy and spooky, and I loved it enough to be duped into reading the next 600+ pages hoping something great would happen. And then feeling throughout like maybe I should stop reading? But oh man I’ve already read 250-300-450-500 pages, and I’m in it, and I should just finish it because it could turn itself around and maybe, maybe, maybe....
Nope. Instead I got this:
A few twists and turns and scary parts, but mostly hundreds and hundreds of pages of repetition and SO MUCH BITING by deer and scratching and burning and shooting and crashing and lots of chasing and screaming and more chasing and more deer and people with their eyes sewn closed and the simile of baby teeth used approximately 50 times and then a giant chunk of text wRittEn liKe tHiS beCausE yOu dOn’T aLreAdY haVe A BiG enOuGh heaDacHe fRoM reaDinG tHis sTupId godDaMn bOOk, all wrapped up with a garbage bow of weird Christian crap that ruined everything and a bit more deer biting and screaming for good measure.
I hate this book with the fire of 1,000 suns.
Rating: really liked it
This book went two vastly different directions for me.
Sometimes I thought it was fascinating, unique, creative, and genius – 5 stars
Other times I though it was dragging on, too repetitive, wanted it to get to the point, way too long – 1 star
Sometimes those two feelings would occur within a couple of pages of each other.
It was quite wild ride!
This is nothing like The Perks of Being a Wallflower. If I didn’t know it was the same author, I would never have guessed it.
The story reminded me of a mix of Stephen King’s It, Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, and Scott Hawkin’s The Library at Mount Char.
If you want to read this because you loved Chbosky’s Wildflower, proceed cautiously. If you love long, weird, existential battles between good and evil, then this should probably be on your TBR ASAP!
In the end I am going 4 stars because the positives I took from this greatly outweighed the low points.
Rating: really liked it
Started ok, but dragged on way too long. It really should have been half its length. I skimmed to the end and my rating kept shedding stars as I plowed through the nonsense. I am not a fan of Christian fiction and if it had been advertised as such I never would have started the book, and I would have been spared.
Rating: really liked it
Perks of Being a Wallflower was not part of my adolescence and I’m not much of a horror reader although I do enjoy it every once in a great while. So, I’m not quite the right reader for this ambitious novel. Needless to say twenty years after the publication of Perks, Imaginary Friend is quite a departure for Chbosky. As is fairly typical of horror novels, the main conflict is good vs. evil, God vs. the devil and so on and so forth. The kids-in-jeopardy trope is in full swing which echoes King but with less success. I found the kids to be too young at seven years old; perhaps eleven years old would have made it a bit more palatable. This is a long novel and there is a lot that should have been cut due to an overload of repetition. I was about to tear my hair if I read “…like baby teeth” one more time. This is just one example. In its favor, it reads fast and is action-packed. Will it sell in the marketplace? Yes, like green wildfire.
