Matt's Reviews > Imaginary Friend

“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.