Imaginary Friend

Book, 2019

Premise - A young boy and his mother move to Western Pennsylvania to escape an abusive boyfriend. Upon arriving, the boy starts to notice strange changes in his behavior, and his luck, worsened by a mysterious six days lost in the local woods. The surge in good fortune appears to be caused by some indescribable force, an imaginary friend perhaps, who whispers all of the guidance the boy needs to set his life right. But his imaginary friend keeps leading him back into those woods...

Review - Well, this book was an undertaking! My goodness, it's over 700 pages. Stephen Chbosky's first and only other novel, Perks of Being a Wallflower, is an easy read for one sitting. Chbosky admitted that he anticipated Imaginary Friend would be of similar length, and had no idea he was writing his own version of The Lord of the Rings (his words, not mine) when he first brainstormed the concept over ten years ago. But as the story grew, so did the lore, and all of the other side characters, and it just became an epic more than a standard novel. No matter what I say about this novel in the rest of the review, I have mad respect for this man to dedicate ten years of his life to getting his next work to be exactly how he wanted it, especially a horror/thriller that's such a far departure from the work that made him famous.

Everything about this book had me excited for very personal reasons. I loved Perks and the Beauty and the Beast remake for which he wrote the screenplay. This is also just an author who is in the correct network of other people I'm interested in. If you flip the book over, there are reviews written from Joe Hill, John Green, and Emma Watson. This is my crowd! Most importantly, he did a one-hour long interview with Emma Watson discussing the book, and I fast-tracked the book's spot on my reading list for the sole purpose of being able to watch that interview without fear of spoilers. So, I got the audiobook from the library, blanched when I realized it was like 25 hours long, and then the coronavirus happened as I was about 5% of the way in. Audiobooks are for my commute, and I struggle to commit to them elsewhere. So I bought the heavy, massive book for quarantine and took on the full adventure. This was kind of a blessing because so much of the art of the book is the way it's written - I mean literally, written, where chaRacTerS mIghT taLk likE tHis. Sometimes hidden messages were in the capitalized letters. That would have been lost in translation for an audiobook.

I was madly impressed with how beautiful the writing was. Perks was written incredibly stylistically from the perspective of a traumatized boy with a limited capability of understanding his world. This was a standard, third-person novel written with such an incredible descriptiveness that never ceased to captivate me. I think it's also incredibly important to mention that something about the way this was written TERRIFIED me. I had trouble reading this at night with the lights off, which is so incredibly rare. Words themselves can only be so terrifying, but there was something uneasy about the capitalization or italicization of letters or words that just triggered some sort of fear chemical in my brain. So Chbosky is one hell of a writer.

A separate question is, is he a hell of a storyteller? Because there is a difference. And I think the majority of criticism for this novel lies in the storytelling. It starts out fantastic, with this little boy and his mother and the mysterious woods and man in the clouds. Yet over the course of 700+ pages, the simplicity of the story derails significantly and we're left with very convoluted lore. There are so many characters to keep track of. So much insanity in the plot. I have absolutely NO idea how this would translate to film/television but Chbosky seems to have it in mind. And, most controversially, the story becomes embedded in religion. I think some people flipped out and either thought it was too blasphemous or too preachy. You can't really win with religion in storytelling. Religious horror is a rare genre, but a personal favorite of mine with stories like, say, Horns. So I may be biased in saying that for all its faults in pacing, extraneous material, and wildly strange plot twists, I think the merits of the book far outweigh the faults. But this sure is a difficult plot to explain to someone.

I appreciate the novel because through all its convolutions, it raises incredibly existentially and spiritually thought-provoking questions. Why do people sin? Is any sin truly so bad that someone is worthy of damnation? And how can we decide that when everybody's sins are tied together? - So much of life is interpersonal, and there's so much generational trauma we carry. What does it take for a person to be redeemed of damnation? And what is God's role in all of this, if there is a God? There are also some thought-provoking feminist twists in the novel (like, spoiler, the "nice" man who is clean cut was the devil all along, he was just too easily trusted. And the scary snake lady was Eve, she was just too easily avoided for seeming evil. Also, the only character more powerful in the book besides God is God's mother).

I did finish the book with a little bit of an ambivalent feeling, as the story became progressively harder to follow, as well as increasingly layered in levels of realities. I had no idea what I was reading towards the end. I also felt as though I may have understood certain parts more if I was more well-versed in the Bible. Does 2:17 mean something? Is it a particular verse? Also, why deer? However, upon watching the interview between him and Emma, I was able to understand so much more of his intentions. Chbosky grew up in Pennsylvania, like Christopher, and was similarly surrounded by Catholics. The woods and the deer were also just part of the aesthetic of Western Pennsylvania that made him nostalgic as a writer. And writing Christopher was important because the center of his stories always needs to be a young person, like Perks. I respect him so much for that, as he specifically stated there is no adult story he can find more captivating than a youth's story, because at the center of it all is coming of age. I felt like he was speaking directly to my soul when he said that. Listening to how much of himself and his values/beliefs that he put into the story, I felt as though I understood the novel SO much better, even though there was not a single spoiler in the interview. He didn't need to get specifics, just listening to him talk I had a better sense of who he was as a person, and why this is such an important book to him. Here comes the sequel! (87/100)

Quote - "If God were arrested for murder, would people ask for the death penalty?"

What to read for - Again, I think there is incredible value in reading the novel and immediately after, watching that interview with Emma Watson.

If you liked this book, I'd recommend Horns for the religious horror and the devil persuading people to do horrible things, NOS4A2 for the creepiness of Christmas and focus on youth, and Stranger Things for the fun balance between different stories/perspectives.

Written by Stephen Chbosky
Published by Grand Central Publishing