This morning I FINALLY managed to finish Imaginary Friend. I started this book and was immediately hooked. It was uber creepy, really well written, I was loving it.

Sadly it was all downhill from there. 700+ pages of which maybe half ended up being relevant/adding to the story. Now I love a tome. I recently read Wanderers which was longer than this one but had zero wasted scenes or words and was an epic that read fast. So it's not the length itself that was an issue. I read King and Tolstoy. Trust me I can cope with a long narrative that you need to commit to.

It was the slogging through endless pages of repetitive nonsense, towards a pay off that irritated me, didn't really make sense and subjectively wasn't worth the effort. It was the eventual realisation that this was one long sermon from which I am supposed to learn something (And boy does the author ram that down your throat ad finitum for the last 20%) It was basically (In my opinion) the author plugging his belief system but disguising it as a horror story. Well you know what you can do with THAT shenanigans.

Too long. Way too long. Even allowing for my very personal reaction to what this book was, and allowing that quite rightly for some readers this novel will resonate in a different way , I honestly believe it needs a HUGE edit. There's so much white noise the plot, the "message" whether that message appeals to you or not, gets lost along the way. It's probably in the woods with about a million deer and a few white plastic bags.