This book was well written. The story drew me in right away but it was to long to fully keep my attention.
Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher and author for this ARC.

Thoroughly enjoyed this book, but I did find it to be a bit long. Had to force myself to read it at times, but will absolutely recommend this enthusiastically to my customers.

Stephen Chbosky has proven himself again! Imaginary Friend is an engaging horror story out just in time for Halloween. Highly recommended to readers looking for a spooky read for the season.

By leaving the man the first time he hits her, Ms. Reese is doing what she thinks is right for her son. Life is already hard enough without his father, he deserves a happy, healthy childhood. They travel until she finds a nice out of the way town to settle down. Christopher is just seven years old quiet boy with a learning disability trying to find his place in his new surroundings. Then he goes missing.

Six days later he is found safe and healthy, but a series of small occurrences begin to change their lives. Positive effects from winning the lottery to Christopher becoming one of the smartest of his class, to more negative beginning with Christopher talking about The Nice Man and the finding of a child's grave in the woods.


This story encompasses the whole town, using Christopher as our doorway into the darker side of the invisible world, a Good vs. Bad battle between the Hissing Lady and The Nice Man. Some of the story is told from other townspeople's perspective, but the majority is told by a very young Christopher. Who becomes able to see and feel the innermost thoughts of those around him through is ever enhancing abilities. The story continues to build until the events begin to involve all the members of the town ensuing in chaos and hell on Earth.


I felt that the pacing of the story could really be felt at times longing for something eventful to happen again, but I always kept coming back to the story because of the great imagery. Whenever we are presented the darker imaginary world that Christopher continues to find himself in I am glued to the pages. It's horrific, brutal and gives me what I was hoping for in this book. I enjoyed the story and the writing, it is one I will be reading again. I give it 4 stars.

Thank you so much to Grand Central Publishing for providing me with a complimentary copy of this book for my review.

This is one of those books that I am in complete awe of the author for creating such an amazing and fantastical world. How Stephen Chbosky came up with the plot, characters, and events in this story is beyond my comprehension and I loved it.

I’m going to go ahead and admit that I am one of the slim few that have never read The Perks of Being A Wildflower and I’m a little ashamed to say it. I had no clue what to expect going into this novel and I was definitely not prepared for what I experienced.

Don’t let the size of this book and the small print intimidate you, this story is amazing and twisty and dark but oh so good. I loved the character of Christopher and how kind-hearted and what a protector he was. He is such a sweet kid trying to help out his mom and also overcome all of the problems they’ve had in their life. I know a lot of people were saying this book was way too long but honestly, I thought it was too short (I know, you would think over 700 pages is enough) but I didn’t want this story to end. I wanted to read more about Christopher and his friends and family and find out about their lives after all the craziness went on.

All of the characters and events that went on in this book were executed perfectly and I honestly found myself gasping more than a few times with some of the crazy things that happened. If you like almost paranormal, religious, fantasy I would say you would really enjoy this book. It definitely is unlike anything I’ve ever read before and I feel this was perfect as his big comeback novel.

This was a hard one for me. I really enjoyed it overall, but the writing style made it very hard to follow.
I am not used to this author's way of telling a story. I found myself losing interest from time to time. It seemed to have a lot of extra description that wasn't needed. I am looking forward to the adaptation of it though.

I was really excited about this one and thought it would give the ultimate Halloween vibes! It started off so great but overall it was just too LONG. The end went off the rails and in the end I was left disappointed.

One of my most anticipated books of the year! I read the first 400 pages in 2 days and then after page 500 it started slowing down and becoming a little bit repetitive. I saw the plot twist coming a mile away. But I still thoroughly enjoyed this!

I wanted to love this book. The premise is terrifying and Chbosky is an amazing writer, which should be a recipe for success. This time, for me, it was not.
The first 50% of the book was good, but around that point it started to take a downward turn for me. I loved the world building, the fleshed out characters, and was genuinely invested in the story. The pacing started to lose me around the halfway mark, and I found myself skimming some passages just to get to the ending, which I knew would be spectacular. Unfortunately, I found the ending to be jumbled and strange, and I absolutely hated the religious turn everything took.

I will not be posting this review anywhere else. Thank for for the opportunity to read and review this book.

I received a complimentary copy of Imaginary Friend from NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.
Who knew treehouses could be so sinister? This was a very long novel, which I did not mind for most of the book. I was 100% engaged for the better part of a week until towards the end when I expected events to begin wrapping up. When they didn't, the story became pretty redundant, however. Repeatedly entrapped by his nemesis, the little boy main character, Christopher, lived out similar situations to the point where I felt like I had actually read some of those parts before. Overall, it was a very original book. I loved the plot and a huge twist/"aha" moment towards the middle-end.
Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC.

Yes, my title on this post is absolutely correct for those that know of Stephen Chbosky’s earlier works in the young adult contemporary genre, this new title is definitely some chilling horror. There are even some similarities to the horror master himself, Stephen King in Chbosky’s new novel.

The story begins following single mother Kate Reese and her son Christopher who have made a new home in Mill Grove, Pennsylvania after fleeing an abusive relationship. Mill Grove seemed like the perfect place to make a new life until the unthinkable happened and Christopher disappeared.

Six long days pass for Kate as everyone pitches in and searches for her boy who was last seen near the woods. But despite all the searching Christopher was no where to be found until he suddenly appeared on his own saying a stranger helped him not seeming to know what happened. But as thankful as Kate was to have her son back soon Christopher begins to show signs that something is not quite the same.

Now, for me being someone who has read and watched tons and tons of horror over the years I will say this was a solid, creepy tale but not necessarily anything new. As with some early King novels you find this follows the kids a lot but also changes points of view between many characters. It also to me seemed to get a bit draggy which isn’t surprising with the length of it, the first half seemed to also go better than the second but overall I’d give this one 3 1/2 stars.

I received an advance copy from the publisher via NetGalley.

This was fantastically frightening!! A mysterious wood, a small town and a imaginary friend. All the elements needed for a truly scary story. This is my first book by this author. He has a great sense of place and I felt as is I was there in the Mission Woods fighting evil with Christopher the tiny hero of our story. This story is truly unique and kept me coming back for more , exciting to the last page.

It was the best of books; it was the worst of books. Big thanks go to Net Galley and Grand Central Publishing for the review copy. This book is for sale now.

Chbosky met fame twenty years ago with The Perks of Becoming a Wallflower. He takes a bold step—and I would still argue, a good one—in switching genres with Imaginary Friend. The whole thing is written in accessible language and mostly short, simple sentences with the overall effect of the world’s creepiest bedtime story. At first I wasn’t sure I was down for 720 pages of simple sentences, but he makes it work. I like the horror of it, and I like the voice too. And so when I saw the mixed reviews, I was preparing my heated defense of this work before I was even halfway in. And halfway, sadly, it where the thing begins to weaken.

The premise is that seven year old Christopher is learning disabled, but his mother urges him to keep trying. Nothing much works until the day he is lost in The Mission Street Woods. He is called by a friendly face in the clouds; once he is there, he is incapacitated and held for six days. When it’s over, The Nice Man leads him out. He goes home; the perpetrator is never identified because Christopher recalls none of the six days nor who took him. But suddenly he is the world’s cleverest kid. His grades rise, and he graduates from the special classroom. Later in the story, he is called again to build the tree house to end all tree houses; he must do it furtively at night, because he is no longer allowed in those woods, and naturally that’s where the project unfolds.

This aspect of it is very cleverly conceived and executed. Christopher does all manner of things that no seven year old child, however advanced intellectually, would be able to do but it is plain to us that this is part of the supernatural effect that is part and parcel of The Nice Man and that face in the clouds. Likewise, there are many areas where he infers adult meanings and feelings, but we know that these are also supernaturally bestowed. Meanwhile, he is in most ways the way one would expect a child his age to be. As his friends—the twins and Special Ed—are drawn into the project, they too become capable students with unusual talents. But as to the tree house, that’s a big damn secret. Parents and the public are not in the loop for a long, long time.

As the story unfolds we have numerous subplots and several characters that have significant roles here. They are largely bound together by the children’s school, although we also have the sheriff and a handful of people from the nursing home where Christopher’s mother, Kate works. I have no difficulty keeping up with this large cast of characters, and Chbosky deserves kudos for creating so many distinct characters that stay consistent throughout the story. We see the ways that people become warped, often by the disappointments that life has meted out, and sometimes by mistaken goals, particularly where the children are concerned. I liked this a good deal too. We see a great deal of kickass figurative language, although I would have preferred to see a lighter hand with regard to the repetition. At first when the song “Blue Moon” is used, it gives me chills, but by the end of the story, whenever music enters a scene I find myself grumbling, “Oh let me guess. I bet I know what song is playing.” (The MAD Magazine of the 1970s would have had a field day with this book.)

A number of other reviewers have suggested that the second half of the story could do with some serious editing down, and I echo their concern. It would be stronger if it were tighter. But there are two other more serious concerns that dropped my rating from four stars to three. They have to do with mixed genre, and with Chbosky’s depiction of women and girls.

It is a brave thing to combine horror and literary fiction, but there is such a thing as trying too hard. The last twenty-five or thirty percent of this story becomes tortuous, confusing and overlong with the heavy use of allegory along religious lines. There are multiple places where the plot just doesn’t make sense at all, but because the author is determined to provide us with a virgin birth, stigmata in multiple characters (what?), sacrifice and redemption and yada yada yada, what has been a good horror story becomes a little ridiculous and a lot pretentious. It’s a crying shame. Had the author let the horror story be a horror story, or had he been satisfied with a more subtle level of allegory rather than the screaming-red-flags variety that is shoehorned in here, this would have been a much better book.

The other aspect , the one that made my feminist heart simmer is the way that women are depicted here. We have several important female characters, and none of them is developed in even the tiniest way beyond their relationship to men and their capacity to be nurturers. Our greatest female hero is Kate, mother of Christopher, and I have not seen as two-dimensional a character in many a year. The only thing that matters is her child. The only. The only. Gag me with a stick, already. And had the author been content to have a horror story that is just a horror story I would cut him a little slack, because most horror stories do not have brilliantly developed characters. Even so it’s ham-handed, but I might have been tempted to call this a 3.5 star read and round it upward. But this is the most reactionary treatment of women—the girlfriend that feels filthy because she rendered oral sex; the women coming unstuck because of husbandly inattention; the stereotypical mean-old-broad at the nursing home—that I have seen in decades. It’s appalling, and it bothers me that other reviewers haven’t mentioned this at all. What the hell, guys? And with literary fiction, a responsibility for nuance and character development is conferred in a way that horror novels do not require.

In other words, don’t talk the talk unless you’re gonna walk the walk.

Should you buy this book? Probably not, unless your pockets are deep and you have a good deal of free time. For the curious, I recommend getting it cheap or free. But if you are going to read it, read it critically, and don’t hand it off to your middle-schooler until you have read it yourself.

Chbosky is thriving! I was so excited to see he was coming out with a new book, and it was SO good! This book is everything spooky: feelings of dread, awe, horror, disbelief... keeps you on your toes!

A boy with learning difficulties disappears for six days and returns seemingly unharmed but suddenly excelling at schoolwork but at the same time haunted by voices and a mission to build a tree house in the woods where he disappeared.

This book started out great--Chbosky is an excellent writer and really brings the characters and story to life--but the last few hundred pages of the big epic war to save the world just went on too long and there was just too much going on. There was some great imaginative stuff there and some really interesting biblical parallels, but it was just too much and for too long.

Kate and her son Christopher have just moved to Mill Grove, PA, on the run from Kate's last boyfriend. It looks like there perfect place to start over...until Christopher disappears for six days. And when he returns, he's got a new friend...

I wanted to love this one. I really, really did. And there were aspects of it that I did like. I enjoyed the initial premise of the book and the beginning had me hooked. Unfortunately, it got too long, too dragged out, and too surreal...and I found myself rushing through the pages - not because I was eager to see what happened, but more because I just wanted to be done. I adored Perks, so I really had high hopes for this one...unfortunately, I was disappointed.

I began recommending this book to my friends when I was a third of the way through. It seemed to have all the elements of a good fantasy-thriller, a sympathetic child standing against the forces of evil, a range of characters with both human failings and aspects of evil that combined in creative ways, a few good supporting friends and family that seemed to give our hero a fighting chance and a mysterious setting of woods behind the house in which Christopher and his mother live that added to the horror. I was sure that I was going to relish all 700+ pages. I compared it to the work of Stephen King and the Netflix series Stranger Things, and looked forward to many happy chills.
Then about halfway through I began to lose my enthusiasm for the story. The best way to explain this is to compare it to my experience with a totally different piece of art — the music of Maurice Ravel’s Bolero. If you haven’t heard this before, you might want to find it on the web. Ravel takes a small musical phrase and repeats it in an unrelenting manner, gradually getting louder and louder til it reaches its finale in a cacophonous crescendo. What captures you at the beginning has become a torment to your senses, similar to Imaginary Friend. What the artist strives for is the same concept repeated over and over with the intention of chilling and then horrifying the reader. Instead we have the same situation repeated so many times, it loses its ability to terrify. How many times can an army of mailbox people with lips and eyes sewn closed with black thread keep the horror at a fever pitch? Why did the author use deer as the animal guardians of the evil leader? Wolves would have been much more relatable and the idea of deer sneaking through the woods was somewhat silly. How many times can characters put their trust in the voice of a benevolent guide, only to be betrayed? How many bizarre ways can the author find to kill off his characters, especially when we soon learn the characters can’t die? (Knowing that tends to reduce the tension.)
The book itself is a religious metaphor. The young boy is not named Christopher by accident. There is a lot of examination of Hell but I found the theology rather confounding. One element at the very end added an “Ah ha!” moment to the conclusion, but over all the battle between Good and Evil went on so long that I was as worn out as the characters. A good editor could have helped immensely.

I wasn't prepared for what I was getting into with this novel. What started off with a missing child turned into a good vs. evil battle that crossed several life times. The story bogs down into several places, but if you have patience you are rewarded with another twist or turn that takes the story in a different direction. And while Christopher is the main character, his existence is enhanced by the stories of his mom, townsfolk, an abusive boyfriend, a dead dad and goodhearted sheriff. To say more would give away the story.

This book is more of a 2.5 star, but partial stars wasn't an option so I rounded up. This novel started off amazing. I was equality terrified and hooked. I couldn't put it down! then around page 400, it just dragged on and on and on and go kind of stupid. Really great beginning, but the ending was meh. At 700 pages this book is a commitment that won't pay off unfortunately.

I have never read The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I watched the movie, but only distractedly. I could see, however, why for many it could have been a defining teenage read. Chbosky seemed to get to the nitty gritty of being a teenager, addressing some difficult topics while also occasionally romanticizing things. I was hoping for something along those lines in Imaginary Friend, but I'm not entirely sure what I ended up with. Thanks to Grand Central Publishing and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Since writing The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Chbosky has focused on screenwriting, making Imaginary Friend his first novel since 1999. It forms a major departure in both genre and style. Horror is a hard genre to nail. Although we all share certain deep fears in our Unconscious, we still all have different fright levels. Over the decades of his career, Stephen King has risen to the very top of the genre due to his ability to find those deep fears and play with them masterfully. He nails the slow build up of dread, the horror of a wise-before-their-age child, the monsters that hide in the dark, and above all, the cruelty of a grown up world. Each of these are frequently mimicked, but hardly ever truly surpassed. Imaginary Friend plays with many of the same themes: lost children, dark woods, cruel adults, the question of what is good and what is evil. Chbosky's novel left me truly torn, as I did enjoy it, but only finished it through sheer stubbornness and perseverance.

The set-up for Imaginary Friend is brilliant. A young boy and his mother arrive in a quiet, solitary town and shortly after, he disappears into the woods for days. When he returns he has changed and slowly the town around him begins to boil over. This roughly describes the first 2/3rds of the Imaginery Friend, at which point the novel seems to lose focus and becomes messier. An ending is difficult, especially if you're trying to imbue your scary story with the larger imagery of religion, conflict, Good vs. Evil, the Final Stand, etc. What this results in is that Imaginary Friend drags on. You can't help but lose interest after the second 'Do or Die' moment, which just ends in setting up the next 'Do or Die' moment. The twists and turns also keep coming, asking more and more suspension of disbelief from the reader. The stakes simply aren't high enough anymore at that point because you can only take your reader to the breaking point so often before it stops being dramatic or, well, good. I also had an issue with how cliche some of the imagery and character development is. My issue isn't that the tropes or characteristics are recognizable, it's that they're passe and never mined for anything deeper than their surface. The women in this novel are subjected to some truly horrible experiences, suffering both physically and mentally in a way the male characters don't. It is undeniable that unfortunately violence is a part of many women's lives, but Chbosky does nothing with these topics in his novel, which means that it comes across slightly antiquated and, again, cliche. The same is true for the religious imagery and themes in the book. You can see them coming from a mile off, but in the end they fell flat for me.

The novel's main problem is that it's way too long. Stephen King is the master of the genre because of how convincingly chilling he can be in few words. Imaginary Friend doesn't seem to stop. It gets more and more elaborate in its hundreds of pages which only weighs the progress of the narrative down. The cause for this is that Chbosky seems too enamored with his own mythology to cut out what was unnecessary. There are frequent repetitions of images and even language that become eye-roll inducing rather than scary. Many of the ideas and themes in Imaginary Friend are truly scary and could have a lot of impact, but being repeated so frequently they lose all their power. This means that, unfortunately, the payoff at the end is not really worth the journey. This also plays into the novels other problem: the many points of view. Much of it is told from Christopher's perspective, which means we're viewing Chbosky's world through the eyes of a 7-year old.. Christopher is a well-written character and the reader does start to genuinely care about him. However, too much is placed on his shoulders, both within the story and as a narrative device for the story itself, which means he becomes rather unbelievable towards the end. Aside from him, there is a whole array of characters, each of which has their narrative described in detail, which slows the whole novel down.

Imaginary Friend is both an homage to Stephen King, as well as an attempt to dethrone him, it seems. Chbosky goes to great lengths to create a mythology of his own and thereby loses the plot and the reader. At over 700 pages, Imaginary Friend asks too much of its reader without offering enough in return.