Imaginary Friend (2019) by Stephen Chbosky – Book Review

So lately, I’ve been reading lots and lots of books. Normally, I average about 30 per year, but now it’s July and I’m up to over 50. Of course it may be a bit cheating, because a lot of those were those short kindle books that are about 200 pages long and you just read them back to back.

Anyway, that being said, I’ve had the pleasure of coming across some particularly fantastic books this year. I also decided that since I’m reading way too much, I should probably write reviews just to give my brain a chance to process what I just read before jumping into the next one.

Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky – Book Review

Imaginary Friend is probably the most brilliant combination of horror, fantasy, and fairy tale, featuring the classic “innocent young child vs monstrous evil entity,” a magic treehouse, a Hissing Lady, and apparently babies that crawl like spiders.

First, I’ll start by saying this is probably the scariest book that I’ve read since Stephen King’s “IT” and that’s really saying a lot.

Like many Stephen King classics, Imaginary Friend is an ambitious read, due to coming in at over 700 pages and more than 100 chapters. That being said, if you aren’t daunted by big books, you may want to pick this one up.

Prior to this novel, I hadn’t heard of Stephen Chbosky, which isn’t really that weird, considering this is only his second novel, and the first one came out 20 years ago. In case you’re not sure which book that was, it was “The Perks of being a Wallflower,” which of course is a completely different genre.
Imaginary Friend is an intriguing novel about good and evil and all the shades of grey in between. The book tackles not just supernatural horror, but the horrors of everyday life including murder, sexual abuse, child abuse, and more.

On the downside, unfortunately it didn’t pull off the “way too long of a book” as well as Stephen King’s 1000-pagers, and it did definitely start to lose steam at the end. Nevertheless, I highly recommend adding it to your “to read” list.

Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky Plot Summary

It’s strangely hard to summarise this story, because half the time you don’t even know what’s going on. I mean that in the best way possible. The story captivated me from page one and kept me going with page-turning suspense (until about page 500.)

So the book opens 50 years in the past, where a young boy disappears into the woods. We don’t know what happened, or if he died, but we can assume he did.

Fast-forward 50 years again, 7-year-old Christopher and his mother move to a new town to escape her abusive boyfriend. Somewhere in the first week of school, Christopher wanders off into the woods and is not seen for 7 days. When he is found, he has no memory of what happened while he was in the woods, except for a “nice man,” who showed him the way out.

With Christopher safe, it would seem like all is well again, but things are not as them seem. Soon strange events begin to take place throughout the town, and there seems only one way to link them all together. It’s up to Christopher to safe his town from an evil entity that is threatening to destroy all he knows.