Spoilers NOT Included!
The story begins with Kate, the mom, and Chris, the main protagonist, on the road looking for a place to live as Kate runs from an abusive boyfriend. She had no money to her name and little food to provide Chris. She was moving from state to state, from motel to motel, in search of a better life when she finally decides on Mill Grove, Pennsylvania. Chris starts attending Mill Grove Elementary and Kate begins trying to get her life back in order by working at a nursing home called Shady Pines. As Chris starts trying to make friends, you learn that he is dyslexic. But when a mysterious entity, who is later revealed by Chris to be "the nice man", appears to Chris on the computer screen during school, Chris and Kate’s issues are completely gone, that is, not before Chris goes missing in an abandoned coal mine and is not seen for 6 days.
With his sudden return back to reality, Chris brings with him a strange energy, one that not only "cures" him of his dyslexia, but also "gives back to the community". It even helps Kate win the lottery, which gets rid of her money problems and then coincidentally leads her to buy a beautiful home right behind the Mission Street Woods. What a great imaginary friend, am I right? Of course, with most things, there is always an equal trade off. The arrangement: I take care of all your problems and in return you build a tree house in the middle of Mission Street Woods before Christmas of this year, or everyone in town will die.
The number of characters that make up the rest of the novel are quite extensive. From the first iteration of chapters in the story, you are immediately introduced to David Olson, 50 years before the events that unfold, as a kid running away and hiding from that entity in the woods that they call "the hissing lady". He is "abducted" and is never heard from again. Ambrose, David's brother, is left scarred and with doubt that his brother was abducted. He remains in Mill Grove and we meet him for the first time in Shady Pines as a much older man.
Mary Katherine is a devoted and faithful Catholic teen. She has a boyfriend named Doug, who once felt her up during a make out session near the elementary school and she thought she was pregnant; she is a virgin and that remark becomes a crucial element to her story. Her journey in the novel starts with her need to please her parents and get accepted into a good Catholic University. Running late that night, Mary's life changes when she spots Chris after his sixth day, walking out from the hills and onto the street. Her story is one of twists and turns and a perplexing ending that I would need to re-read just to understand. Chris's group of friends: Mike and Matt (Twins) and Edward Charles Anderson (Eddie), who gets the nickname 'Special Ed' by everyone in school. Jenny Hertzog and Brady Collins are bullies to Chris and his friends for the entire story, but their arcs turn horrifically dark, incredibly fast. Then there is Bobby the Sheriff, whose story is also riddled with a dark, but sad past, one that involves a girl with the painted nails who used to call her daddy. It was probably just my imagination putting two and two together, but I felt a little bit of Sheriff Belfour from Tru Blood in Bobby. Then you have this mysterious entity known as the “the nice man” who is represented as a white bag on a stick in the ground and the hissing lady who is addressed as such by the way she approaches and speaks. There are another set of characters who become crucial to the story, but only towards the ending so I won't include them, but it will make for an interesting re-read.
So what can I say about this story that isn't already on your mind? Because if you're reading this, you probably had a similar thought: This isn't like Perks! Horror? What the? Best of all, you and probably everyone else have felt the exact same feeling. Stephen decided to go from everything that was Perks and completely reinvent himself by spinning up his version of a horror novel. He is greatly inspired by Stephen King and even mentions him as his Inspiration for everything else in the acknowledgements page. And if your next questions is: is this novel even worth it? …oh Yes, it truly is.
I don’t think I've come across a novel so much like this one. It almost feels like I was watching an episode of Castle Rock or Under the Dome, which subsequently were all either written or inspired by Stephen King. The concept here is that along the way, something as innocent as an imaginary friend can turn diabolical and sinister, that even the concept of how it gets resolved is even a mystery at the very end. I think back to all the movies that have that Imaginary Friend element to it and it doesn’t feel like a good comparison. Majority of the time, the imaginary friend was someone who died and was haunting the house or a building. This novel takes reality and quite literally sends you to what "the nice man" calls the imaginary side. It places you deep in the woods and forces you to feel the snow between your toes and makes you want to jump up into a tree to get away from the snarling. Stephen can take this book and turn it into a mini-series. It has the perfect setup, cliff hangers, and attention grabbers. If you’ve watched 11/22/63, then that’s what this could ultimately be turned into.
Unfortunately with all novels, there is always something to be wary about and Imaginary Friend is no exception. My first complaint was how unstructured it all felt. The number of elements in the novel that take place happen almost all at once. You have elements and themes of religion, good vs evil, relationship / family dynamics, end of the world apocalyptic, morality, and a bunch of others. It also doesn’t give you a moment to breathe, which could be a good thing or a bad thing, but it did lead to waves of story arcs that either made no sense, were hard to follow along, or were entangled with a few other themes that it sort of left me wanting to speed things up with those character arcs. For example, Mary Katherine's arc. From the get go, I found myself thinking how unfortunate she was. She was in the story to be in the 'makes you feel bad' character, to be somewhere she wasn’t supposed to, to cause some sort of scene out on the road just at the right time for everything to unfold. This continues to happen all throughout the novel, even in the end. She just ends up in inconvenient places when everything is sort of happening and does nothing but makes it worse. This bothered me because after all the ups and downs of her haphazard story arc, we get the ending that we did and I've yet to understand how any of it is even possible, or better yet, WHY? Why Mary Katherine and why THAT ending?
Another complaint / problematic moment was when I realized the expectations that "the nice man" has of these 7 to 8 year old children. He demonstrates great effort in being able to control everyone in town, so why not use the older, more capable men to build the tree house and then let the children run free into the imaginary side. Since I know now what the motivation was and how It pans out, I feel "the nice man" would have had a much easier time with all this. Literally less planning, more execution, little delays, everything. Or perhaps I've given too much away. My final complaint was the pacing in the novel, which really has more to do with how the story sounds when read out loud versus when you read it in your head. Too many pauses. So many. Stops. Way too many. To even begin to count. The element presented in this writing style is equivalent to verbally telling a story and pausing to enhance either the suspense or actions of characters or situations. That being said, the pausing was all over the place. Practically the whole freaking book! Some parts flowed smooth while others took too long to get through; the rest was a regular book with proper punctuation. I don’t think I would have had such a problem with it if perhaps it was used during crucial moments of suspense, but Chris looking at clouds is not suspenseful. It doesn’t even borderline horror. Even if we do see a face in the clouds, it wouldn’t have been story worthy. You know how many kids and adults see things in the clouds? True story, I looked out my window last week. And saw a dragon. In the clouds. I looked away. For a split second. Long enough to see the shape dissipate.
But, in all honesty, I genuinely and wholeheartedly enjoyed every minute of this novel. It was exactly what I was looking for when I searched up and down the aisles of Barnes and Noble. I stack five or more seemingly interesting books on top of one another and get a peek at the first chapter of each; may the best one win. Imaginary Friend is definitely a page turner. Each chapter is a true and horrifying cliff hanger, right down to the punctuation. The use of empty space in the whole novel enhanced the story and even the use of various fonts to emphasize when the demon spoke was well executed. Stephen at one point used a method that reminded me of what Mark Z. Danielewski did in House of Leaves in which he uses one full page with just one word on it. I love it. The twist in the novel is perfectly executed and I kid you not, there was no way to shut me up after that. "What? No way? Oh my god how?" I said loudly, over and over again. I had to reread that chapter from how excited I was because I just couldn’t believe it. You would think that after watching tons of horror movies I would have picked up on the twist, but this one definitely caught me by surprise. Stephen Chbosky you have left me waiting eagerly for your next novel.
Happy Readings Everyone. Till next time!
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