Beep boop when parent uses full name that means they’re Big Mad, danger imminent. I also once was child, fellow human being.
Everything of Imaginary Friend that I could stand to read was like this, the author apparently plinking away at the keyboard on auto-pilot like he’s tunneling through bedrock, utterly disengaged with the subject matter but convinced that this is a project he needs to finish regardless. A big part of this is that Chbosky decided to write an entire novel from the perspective of a seven year old boy, but is apparently both one of those people who deleted all of their childhood memories at some point, and believes that young children are beings of pure stimulus with no interiority at all. Thus, Christopher’s perspective is like the viewfinder of a camera, passively relating everything he sees to the reader unfiltered and unchanged, without even the heightened emotion of childhood for colouring. The kid might as well be a robot.
Actually that’s not entirely true, he does have some thoughts in his head: he’s really, really, really devoted to his mother, in a way that kids in fiction often are when the author can’t think of any traits to give them beyond “is child, has parent.” If Christopher thinks about anything at all, it’s about how much he loves his mom and how he needs to become a big strong man to protect her. And…that’s it. Other than that he’s head empty, no thoughts 24/7.
The reason I’m so sure the child POV is the problem here is that we do get bits from his mom’s POV, and the writing immediately perks up. Not to a degree that would make me want to keep reading, but enough that someone, at some point, should have told Chbosky to trash the whole book and start over with an older protagonist.
But maybe even that wouldn’t have saved the book. The writing is still dull even when portraying the perspective of someone who the author regards as possessing sentience, the human interactions still feel like they’re being described by an alien who landed on Earth five minutes ago, the “creepy” scenes are still completely lifeless. There is zero passion or energy in evidence here. Maybe the Christian themes are what got Chbosky invested in the story, but I’m not sticking around to find out.