I thoroughly enjoyed Imaginary Friend, an engrossing thriller-horror story of good and evil.

I have never read The Perks of Being a Wallflower but I think that this worked in my favour as I had absolutely no expectations when I first started to read this novel.

Stephen Chbosky has a very appealing style of writing and the characters he created were very believable to me, giving me a great sense of apprehensiveness and foreboding. Although the book was the longest I've read this year, the chapters were short and told from varying points of view which helped to break up the story into convenient chunks, with suitable breaks.

The different voices were excellently done and I found Imaginary Friend to be very readable, if at first, daunting, though there were some very dark and disturbing scenes that included physical assault. In this gripping tale of violence, strangeness and melancholia, the plot moved along at a comfortable rate for me and Stephen Chbosky wrapped everything up neatly which was rather satisfying.

Dispiriting, but not ostentatiously so, this was (mostly) a pleasure to read and I devoured these pages with gusto and enthusiasm.

Imaginary Friend is an extremely impressive novel and I’ll certainly be looking out for Stephen Chbosky's next book.

I received a complimentary digital copy of this novel, at my own request, from Orion via NetGalley. This review is my own unbiased opinion.

I got 1/3 of the way through this before deciding life is too damn short. At 700 pages it’s just way too long. There was a lot I liked about it, but not enough to make me want to read another 500 odd pages of it.

This was an interesting original book but quite complicated and far fetched at times. It wasn't an easy read and at times I felt like giving up. I'm not sure that the boys would have acted in this way at that age. The book seemed to go on for a long time with some areas over complicated. but nevertheless it was well written but just not for me.

Oh my God, this book took what seemed like forever to read. This is not a reflection on the book but rather drastic changes in my schedule. I thought Imaginary Friend was amazing. It reminds me a lot of Stephen King’s masterpiece, IT. This is a good thing as IT is one of the best books I’ve ever read and I’ve never read something yet that even comes close to its greatness. Until now. I loved the way the book unfolds. Things gradually get sinister and darker after Christopher returns from the woods. At first, he seems to have developed strange skills. Before he went into the woods Christopher has autism and struggles to keep up in school. After he comes out of the woods, he seems to have developed an unprecedented ability to do his school-work and read minds. This seems interesting but pretty harmless at first. But it’s far from it. There’s something very wrong in Mission Street Woods and it uses Christopher to escape and spread through the town. I got chills reading this and my flesh crawled more than once.

So this was a strange one for me and If I'm honest it was a tad confusing and times.
I mean I got the general gist but the style of narration was a bit long-winded.
My copy also had an issue with the formating so some of the words would run together which was somewhat irritating as well as this was throughout the whole story.
I rarely comment on the formating itself and I haven't actually taken that into account with my rating as I assume that won't be the case with the finished book itself.
My rating only reflects my enjoyment and connection with the story unfolding.
so this started out well with a new state and town for a single mother and her seven-year-old son Christopher.
Escaping from an abusive relationship mum and son again attempt to start over in a new place renting a room at a local motel, mum finding a new job and son starting a new class.
Imaginary Friend is then told mostly from Cristophers POV.
There is some input from others along the way but this is mainly his roadshow.
Lured into Mission Street Woods by an unknown entity the young boy is missing for six days.
On his return, Cristopher has no memory of the past week just a vague sense of something being off.
But one thing's for sure he is changed and events are set to play out in a battle of epic proportions and Cristopher along with his friends and family are right at the centre of it all.
This had such a creepy ominous undertone mainly because of the young age of the boys involved.
I do think this maybe would have played out better with the boys being slightly older than they were; not by much just maybe nine or ten rather than seven.
It was just all that creeping around at night just seemed unlikely at age seven.
So every unrelated incident here formed a part of a larger whole as events played out until it all begins to make a kind of uneasy sense no matter how bizarre things originally seemed on the outside looking in.
This was all about good versus evil, love and forgiveness and self-sacrifice.
Add into that man's self-serving attitude which is just human nature and we get to my main bug-bear here which was all the overt religious stuff, it was just everywhere.
This book then started to feel very preachy indeed and Imaginary Friend is long so it started to get somewhat tedious.
I am honestly surprised I kept going and this was not a DNF this just went on and on with no end in sight.
I do feel this needs condensing down somewhat as there was just so much unnecessary filling that was serving no purpose at all.
Did I enjoy this? hard one, there were times when this did shine somewhat but then so many others when things just fell flat and this just felt too wordy.
I was looking forward to this one: but I'm sorry to say the actuality for me just didn't live up to the original hype which really is a shame.
I voluntary reviewed a copy of Imaginary Friend.

First off, I'd like to state my rating of this book is not because I was comparing it to Perks. I went into this book fully aware it was a very different genre then the previous, and I honestly didn't really know what to expect. While the writing in here was fine, and I'm sure for some people more versed in horror thrillers than me, there may have been some great writing and story play, I just overall did not enjoy my reading experience with this book hence the low rating.

Imaginary Friend follows the life of seven-year-old Christopher Reese and his mother Kate as they flee Kate's abusive boyfriend and end up making a home in Mill Grove, Pennsylvania - a small town with a close-knit community and most importantly, a safe place for a new start. Things don't go to plan when Christopher disappears for almost a week and when he reappears, he's not the same. Now he hears a hissing woman and sees a nice man, and he's aware that something bad is coming for everyone in the town in a terrible battle between good and evil.

Hmm, where to start? The writing and the characters in this I did really enjoy. I definitely felt a very instant connection to Christopher, who is genuinely a very sweet little boy who loves his mom, and Kate is that courageous lioness of a mother you'd expect her to be while still being really brave to new beginnings and romantic relationships. I loved Christopher's relationship with Special Ed and the M&M's - Stephen Chbosky is excellent at building up such lovely personalities in his characters that just wrap around your heart. He also showed his skill in this book at some not-so-nice characters like Mrs Collins and Brady and Jenny. Mrs Henderson and Miss Latzo also fell into this grey area where they were both good and bad because of circumstance but still redeemable.

I enjoyed the start of this book and the build-up to Christopher's disappearance and just what it was all about. Some of the twists and turns, and reveals, were cleverly done as well but I think sometimes when it comes to children in horror, things get a bit ridiculous that I don't find scary - such as the clouds, and the white plastic bag.

I'm still a newbie when it comes to horror and I don't have a vast array of titles under my belt yet so I'm still figuring out what I like to read about in the genre and this type of horror I think just wasn't quite it - from how ridiculous some of the scenarios got (though I could definitely feel the horror and how scary it would be if a town got sick and mad at the same time). I didn't really like how messy everything got - it kind of felt like it was in a room full of brawling, screaming people and honestly, it really made my mind feel very cluttered and like I wanted to just sit in some quiet space or meditate for a while.

I'm not a fan of extremely religious books, and I didn't like how this book slowly started to reveal all the religious undertones. I didn't find the last couple of pages very surprising but also I was a bit like wtf.

A lot of the characters in this book, particularly the women, had abusive storylines or pasts attached to them and I just didn't like how people acted towards the women and talked to them. It actually felt a bit dated. From abusive fathers and mothers, to sexual assault (including the molestation/sexual assault of a child by a sibling), drinking problems, shitty husbands and abortion (I didn't like the language used around abortion at all - how it was implied to be wrong/dirty/murder). The pressure on Mary Katherine's virginal state was a bit nauseating and honestly the lack of information/knowledge she seemed to possess around sex, sexual acts, and even simple things like pregnancy tests were all unbelievable for me. I didn't like how Mary Katherine's character was used.

This book is also HORRENDOUSLY long. Way, way, way too long! Things felt like they began reaching a peak at 50% through and then it just kept going and going and going. I'm a fast reader and I found this book very long, and was very aware when I was reading it how long it was. So I can't imagine how a slower reader would feel. I do think personally, I prefer reading longer books in physical format so I can see the pages I've read and how much I've left. So maybe I wouldn't have felt this if I had a physical book.

Maybe this book would be perfect for some fans of the horror genre, those who like the classics, and horror focusing on religion and an archaic form of good versus evil. It just didn't do much for me.

When I finally finished reading Stephen Chbosky’s Imaginary Friend I was struck by two things: it really had been a mission to see it through to the end and I wasn’t sure I had grasped most of it. If I’d taken any notice of the hype surrounding this book or indeed realised its horror genre maybe I wouldn’t have chosen to read it at all. On the positive side I loved Ambrose but failed to empathise with anyone else. I’m sorry to say that in all honesty I found it seriously overlong and repetitive. Thanks to NetGalley for the ARC.

I really struggled to finish this book. It started off well enough but then it just went on and on! The story could have been told in half the number of pages, instead it got so repetitive which didn’t actually add anything of value to the book. From halfway I couldn’t understand why there was still so much to go.
This appears to be a bit of a marmite book. Many reviewers have loved it but for me it was too rambling and once I realised what was behind all the strange events I just got so bored.
Thank you to Netgalley for this copy.

Christopher and his mum Kate never seem to stay in one place very long. He's just started yet another new school, and having trouble finding friends and fitting in.
Then he 'meets' an imaginary friend, the Nice Man, and follows him into the woods near his home; the same woods in which a young boy disappeared 50 years ago. Christopher, too, disappears, but only for six days. On his return, he isn't the same boy. He's suddenly much cleverer than before and now has an obsession with building a treehouse in the middle of the woods - a treehouse which will provide a link between worlds, letting all sorts of evil out ...



Now, I haven't read The Perks of being a Wallflower, but I've seen the film and assumed that this new novel from Stephen Chbosky would be something in a similar vein. Well, fair to say Imaginary Friend wasn't at all what I expected. What you've basically got here is a horror story. It's not a genre I'm a huge fan of - the right story can make my hair stand on end, but so many seem to overdo the build up of tension and I just get irritated with it, and start skipping huge chunks. Sadly, Imaginary Friend falls into the second category. And then God and the Devil somehow got involved, and I really lost interest.


It's far too long. Reading a e-copy I hadn't realised just HOW long - 700+ pages - I'd just felt it dragging on and on. Maybe, just maybe, if it had been shorter it would have held my attention, but it wasn't and it didn't, although I did struggle on till the end.

This is one of the darkest books I've read in a long time, and I mean that in a good way. In most respects, it's completely different from The Perks of Being a Wallflower. It's definitely an adult novel and tackles some challenging subjects, including abuse, self-harm and religion.

My favourite thing about Stephen Chbosky's writing is the characterisation. Imaginary Friend has an important quality that all of my favourite horror novels share: it makes you care so much about the characters before everything falls apart! There's a huge cast of characters and yet I found it easy to keep track of them because they were all so well-developed. I especially liked the group of children – horror about kids always seems to affect me the most!

The plotting in this book is also completely creative and unpredictable. There were so many elements that I never saw coming and I enjoyed working out how the threads of the plot would fit together. It's definitely a slow-burning story in places but it kept my attention.

The imagery in this book is some of the creepiest and most memorable that I've come across for ages. Settings are also used really effectively to amp up the creepiness and develop the plot.

Some of the subject matters meant that this wasn't an easy read but it was a very scary, gripping one. Stephen Chbosky is an insta-buy author for me and I love having no idea what he will write next!

Christopher and his mother move to the small town of Mill Grove after they run from her abusive ex-partner and, at first, their bad luck continues. The only work Kate can get just about pays the bills and Christopher still struggles to follow the numbers and letters which leap around the pages of his school books: when Christopher disappears for six days in local woods their new-found security is set to vanish as hospital bills start to pile in. But, just as Kate is set to skip town again it seems that miracles start to happen – Christopher, for the first time in his life, gets a perfect score on a maths test and using the numbers which were his answers Kate wins the lottery. Life seems to be improving until we realise that the voice Christopher hears in his head, a friendly voice, encouraging him to build a tree-house in the very woods where he went missing, is frighteningly real. The fight in his dreams, between good and evil forces, starts to play out in real life and everyone in Mill Grove is affected. With its cast of children led by a charismatic youngster it reminded me in some ways of Good Omens (never a bad thing) but it is far, far darker. There are still moments of humour but the sense of foreboding which starts to hang over the town as more and more residents fall into a flu-like illness, rising rage and a mindless hatred for Christopher and his friends makes it much more menacing. It also shares strong religious overtones with the Pratchett/Gaiman novel but, in this case, I definitely got the impression that the author was raised as a Catholic (like most of the residents of Mill Grove itself).

If you enjoyed Good Omens and Carrie this would be an excellent choice but, honestly, I think it is worth the effort of reading (even if 700+ pages seems like a big ask) for anyone who enjoys good writing.

I don't read Horror stories much - my imagination is too wild - and I get nightmares, but this one I couldn't put down.
And what this is really, is the battle between Good and Evil - as is common in fantasy novels, with a child/ren at the core of it. But who is really the Good? And who really the Bad? That is the stark choice that the children have to make - at an age when their brains are still very malleable and have yet got to the age of knowledge.
I found myself cheering for the boys and their defence of having a tree house - but what it did to the boys' brains was spooky and eerie. And then there was the 'luck' or payment perhaps and..
I liked the style of the author and found it easy to read, clear and whilst not a short book, the story didn't get boring. An amount of editing out of some of the scenes might of helped, but still excellent in its genre.

I received an ARC copy of this mahoosive book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
It started really well I was quickly drawn into the story.

There is something in the woods behind this Pennsylvanian town. That something attracts the attention of first one boy and then through him his friends and eventually the whole town, Chobsky describes two worlds existing at the same time and creates his horror through that world and its characters such as the "nice man" and the "hissing woman".

There was a catching of breath type storyline through the first half but oh it was too long - much too long. It felt like the author couldn't decide how to finish the book. Every time it seemed like it was coming to the ultimate climax it fell again and something else was added. In the end I couldn't keep anything straight and I simply wanted it to end. I had many "let's just be done with this" moments and I think for this reason I felt the end was deeply unsatisfying.

Having said all that I did better with this book than i did with The Perks of Being a Wallflower which i never finished.

Meh...⁣
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I was so badly wanting to LOVE this one. It was highly anticipated and, like many other people it seems, it just fell flat for me.⁣
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This book is very Stephen King - small town, group of boys, sinister atmosphere. Yet, I just feel like if you're going to write a novel to rival King's then it has to be better than this. There was one twist in here which surprised me and I hadn't guessed beforehand. But even with that, it wasn't very surprising and just felt very simple and overdone. ⁣
⁣
Overall, this book could have been A LOT shorter and I think if it had been cut right down, and the pace, therefore, sped up - it could have been a really creepy read. But for me, it just didn't work and I was bored for most of the midsection. ⁣
⁣
I really hope other people love this one, and I am the unpopular opinion but it just wasn't for me.⁣
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⭐️⭐️ #imaginaryfriend #books #bookreview #bookstagram #booksofinstagram #booksofinsta #amreading #horror #thriller #twostars

I found this very hard going in places. I usually read a book in a day. This took a week. It seemed never ending and dragged on forever. I do feel this story could still be told with far less pages. I actually have no idea what the hell I’ve read but at the same time I kept reading trying to understand and make sense of it.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the ARC in return for an honest and unbiased opinion.

Imaginary Friend is Stephen Chbosky's second novel but first foray into the thriller/horror genre and is quite a change from his debut The Perks of Being a Wallflower. However, this is a book that has polarised many and will continue to do so. It begins with a bang, grasps your attention immediately and in style, and features a creeping sense of unease right from the outset. It very much reminded me of another Stephen. Undisputed horror royalty Stephen King. Unfortunately, it all went downhill from there and before I knew it apathy had taken over. I rarely struggle to keep turning the pages quite as much as I did here and it became more of a chore than a pleasure. Still, I persevered and eventually completed it which was primarily to give it a fair review.

I usually adore stories bathed in flowery, descriptive language but there is a certain point whereby the tale becomes almost stationary as the author appears to care more about flaunting his love of the dictionary than moving the narrative forward and it sadly became incredibly tedious and tiresome; a literary version of drowning in quicksand and fighting to keep even a remote sense of interest. I am truly at a loss for words as to how this managed to become the 700+ page tome it is.

A prudent editor/publisher should've flagged some of the issues that literally destroyed this as a read. A tighter edit would've had a profound impact and sharpened up the story so that at least some of the filler had been removed leaving it slightly more readable; after all, there actually is a decent, compelling premise here and despite the ubiquitous problems I imagine some people enjoying although I am not entirely sure who. Stephen King it is not. Couple that with an often patronising and didactic intonation towards the climax and this was a major disappointment. Many thanks to Orion for an ARC.

Here's some advice: don't undertake this book lightly like I did. Ah, it's Stephen Chbosky, I said to myself, but it looks like he wrote a thriller and not a young adult book. I'm down for that. Not realising it had 720 pages. Not realising it was a horror book and not a thriller. Not realising it was going to be the weirdest book I've read in a good long time.

I cannot emphasise enough how weird this book is. It's an incredibly odd start to a book with the nightmare and the child narrator being lured into the woods by a face in a cloud, and it never really gets less weird from there.

I can certainly see how people would struggle with it because it's a very slow book at times but for some reason I can't quite explain, I found it difficult to put down. I'm not fond of shifting the point of view through different characters at random and on a whim but I guess that's what some authors do with third person narration, and I grew used to it.

I liked the characters - I liked the mother, and I liked the sheriff, and I liked Ambrose, and I liked Christopher even though I usually don't like being stuck with a kid narrator. Although his obsession with the fictional cartoon Bad Cat started to grate on my nerves.

The problem was that I wasn't sure where the book was going, and I really wasn't sure what it wanted to be. I feel like this book was maybe an example of the editor being too scared of the author's name to do too much editing. It meandered a lot, and I was left unsure what the point of the whole thing was to be honest.

A small aside is that I ended up reading the world's worst formatted ARC copy of this book. Words will become
massively spaced out
and then we'llgetawholesentenceortwothatrunsalltogetherlikethis. It's a very small complaint that hasn't affected my reading of the book as much as you'd expect. In fact, it made that opening prologue where Christopher is having a nightmare a fair bit scarier before I realised it was a formatting mistake.

Goodness me, this is a long book - 720 pages.  And it feels like a weighty book as well.  There's a lot going on, and a wide reaching cast of characters.

I think that, for the most part, the author pulled this off.  It could have been shorter I think, but the pacing didn't bog down.  The tension rose incrementally through the telling of the tale, and the increased changing in POVs as the story went on worked well to support that.

It has been a whilst since I have read a horror that I enjoyed as much as this - one that put me on edge, that had me ruminating over the story.

If you have several hours to spare - this might just be the scary story you're looking for.

I voluntarily reviewed an advanced reader copy of this book.

I may never look at a deer the same way again!

My thanks to Orion Publishing Group for an eARC via NetGalley of Stephen Chbosky’s ‘Imaginary Friend’ in exchange for an honest review.

Stephen Chbosky is best known for his 1999 coming-of-age novel, ‘The Perks of Being a Wallflower’, which in 2012 was adapted into a film written and directed by Chbosky. He has stated that he has been working on ‘Imaginary Friend’ for nine years.

Kate Reese is a young widow raising her 7 1/2-year old son, Christopher. Recently she has found herself in an abusive relationship and fled with Christopher to Mill Grove, Pennsylvania, a small town surrounded by trees. Yet it isn’t quite the safe place she imagines.

As the chilling Prologue tells us fifty years previously Little David Olsen had snuck out of his house one night and entered the Mission Street Woods and vanished. Now Christopher is being drawn to the same woods by his imaginary friend: the nice man.

Stephen Chbosky draws upon a primordial fear of the woods. It has the feel of classic Stephen King combined with the hallucinatory visceral horror of Clive Barker; both authors that I admire greatly.

Like theirs this is a doorstopper of a book weighing in at 720 pages. So yes, it is quite a long book though it held my attention throughout and I was genuinely chilled by it. Although based in a small town and the everyday lives of its inhabitants the theme expands into a conflict between good and evil on a cosmic scale.

I would also note that Christopher and the other children seemed a little young, I was imagining them closer to ten.

Hopefully, Stephen Chbosky will be adapting this into visual media of either film or limited series.

I am giving this novel five stars as I am confident that it is going to have great appeal to lovers of modern epic horror and will quickly take its place alongside other notable works of the genre.

'Imaginary Friend' is a fantasy horror of epic proportions. I loved the central characters in this book, they are beautifully rounded and full characters. Chbosky writes believable relationships, whether dealing with parent and child, siblings, friends or partners. Though I couldn't believe the age of the boys, even at the beginning.

The plot builds slowly along with the suspense, but what could have been an amazing and thrilling story felt very diluted by constant repetitions and an overly drawn out ending.

While it didn't keep me reading into the night, it is an enjoyable story with great characters.