Books I Didn't Finish: Imaginary Friend

Here’s a quick post about a book I didn’t get too far into at all.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say up front that I started reading this with the expectation that it was going to be hate-read blog fodder. The negative reviews among horror fans drew me to it in the first place, and the more I read, the more fascinated I became. We’re talking about a book from an author who hadn’t published anything for twenty years after the critically-acclaimed book that made his reputation (The Perks of Being A Wallflower), moving from respectable literary fare into genre territory, and it was apparently turned down by his previous publisher who had a right of first refusal on anything new he wrote, and according to all the negative reviews it squanders a promising horror story by devolving into a heavy-handed Christian allegory.

Yes. That’s the kind of disaster I am here for.

Unfortunately there’s another big flaw in the book I didn’t anticipate, one that’s no fun at all, which is that Imaginary Friend is death-inducingly boring.

A big part of this comes from the writing style, which…look, I haven’t read The Perks of Being a Wallflower, but I’m just going to assume it has to be livelier than this. The prose in this book is the literary equivalent of unflavoured oatmeal, a heavy, tasteless mass that jams in your throat like cement. Here’s a sample of our protagonist arriving at his new school:

“Christopher got out of the car and approached the school. Dozens of kids were already milling about, saying hello after their summer vacations. These twin brothers were pushing and shoving and laughing. The smaller one had a lazy-eye patch. A couple of girls itched at their new school clothes. One of them had pigtails. When the kids saw him, they stopped and looked at him like they always did in new places. He was the shiny new thing in the store window.”

One of them had pigtails? It’s like I’m living the story.

Immediately after we get this zinger of an observation:

““Hey,” he said. And they nodded the way the kids always did. Quiet and mistrustful at first. Like any animal pack.”

Kids…are mean? They’re kind of like….wolves??? Gosh I’ve never seen that comparison before!

One more example, here you can really feel the tension of the domestic drama:

“There was one time back in Michigan that Christopher hid in the bushes so he didn’t have to go. His mother called his name over and over, but he didn’t say anything. Then, finally, she got really mad and said,

“Christopher Michael Reese, you get out here…NOW.”

She used his three names. And when she did that, there was no choice. You went. That’s it. Game over.”

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.