Stephen Chbosky’s latest offering Imaginary Friend is a blood-soaked, bone-chiller of a horror novel — a far cry from his beloved coming-of-age debut The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which tapped into the difficulties of navigating relationships and love as an adolescent struggling with mental health illnesses. The 700-plus, odd, twisted pages of Imaginary Friend hold a much darker fate that, although revolving around the life of a child, are less a story about the awkwardness of youth and more of a meditation on human brutality. It is a spine-tingling, uplifting yarn which would do Stephen King proud.

Chbosky starts the story with an enigmatic prologue that takes the reader 50 years into the past before the primary narrative begins. It intercepts a scene where little David Olson, in the dead of night, has fled his home in the small town of Mill Grove, Pennsylvania, into the nearby Mission Street Woods. He is on a haunting mission that only he has the capacity to undertake: to protect his older brother Ambrose, to protect his town from the wrath of the demonic entity that is the “hissing lady” who is ambitious in her pursuit to cross over from the imaginary to the real world. The prologue — concluding with the soul-stirring affirmation that little David Olson never returned from the Mission Street Woods — is expertly handled by Chbosky in regard to connections that appear later in the novel, and the retribution that comes with it.

The narrative then shifts to the present day, when Christopher Reese and his mother Kate move to Mill Grove, in the hopes of starting afresh after escaping from her abusive relationship with a deadbeat alcoholic boyfriend. Christopher is a 7-year-old boy who has undergone a series of not-so-very desirable rites of passages — including having to witness the premature loss of his father to suicide. Given his shy nature and dyslexia, which affects his learning ability, he finds adjusting to his new school difficult. He also suffers from social anxiety, making him the ultimate misfit. The plot takes a pleasant turn when Christopher starts befriending other misfits in his class, Special Ed, Matt and Mike. The quality time these children spend together is what turns this novel into a haunting and thrilling opus, pulsing with the radical empathy that makes Chbosky’s work so special.

The storyline takes a titillating twist when Christopher returns after having disappeared for six days. He is retrieved from the Mission Street Woods after being guided out of there by his not-so-imaginary friend, whom he calls “the nice man.” Christopher becomes a genius overnight after his mysterious return to Mill Grove. He begins to display unexpected powers of telepathy and develops an “itch” which tells him when adults are drunk, the truth about who is unfaithful to their partner and what the immediate future holds. He begins to confide in, and seek the guidance of, his friend — the nice man.

From this point on, the mysteries of the Mission Street Woods dominate the novel. Christopher begins to spend more and more time with the nice man and is lured into building a tree house in the Woods with his friends Matt, Mike and Special Ed as aides. The tree house is a cul-de-sac point, serving as a portal that opens into a horrifying alternate version of the town — Chbosky’s version of hell. The cul-de-sac is populated with “mailbox people” with their eyes and lips sewn shut, ice cream with animal teeth for sprinkles and frog’s legs disguised as popsicles being consumed by children. In this alternate world, an ancient war is being waged between the nice man and the hissing lady, with Christopher’s purpose being to free the nice man from the shackles of the hissing lady.

Stephen Chbosky re-enters the literary scene after 20 years with a bone-rattling, horror novel

To be sure, what starts off as a child-centric horror episode develops quickly into themes meant for a more mature audience and definitely not for the faint-hearted. Chbosky’s attempt at weaving a rewritten Bible into the narrative may be off-putting for some, but certainly adds a brilliant twist to the overall plot. Subsequently, the language employed by the author is strong and embedded with innuendo.

Chbosky hits the nail on the head during the characterisation process in his new novel with the same sensibility as he did with his 1999 debut. His empathetic portrayal of characters undergoing and recovering from emotional tragedy is profound and will make just about anyone fall in love with them, making this narrative all the more hard-hitting.

Each character has a special role to play in this bone-jumping novel. Perhaps the most fascinating is Mary Katherine — a sweet, Catholic, high school student who mysteriously becomes pregnant without any discernible reason. Her role is closely linked to Biblical themes and the second coming of Jesus. Her nature as a nurturer, identified in the formative parts of the novel, contributes to the notion and the widely popular belief endorsed by society as well as religion that good always wins — echoing a prominent theme of this novel.

Similarly, Chbosky places great emphasis on familial relations and community love. Kate’s devotion to her son Christopher is the purest and most endearing example of the unshakable, unconditional bond between parent and child, while the theme of community love comes to the fore when the entire town takes on the role of a soldier in the ancient war between the hissing lady and the nice man — the battle of good versus evil.

As a new horror novelist, Chbosky seems to seek inspiration from eminent horror litterateurs such as Stephen King. He takes alliteration to another level when reality keeps repeating itself, but in different circumstances, and each revelation is gorier than the last. This is reminiscent of In the Tall Grass, King’s 2012 novella co-authored with Joe Hill, where the characters get lost in a labyrinth of tall grass, unable to escape, with their most horrific life experiences played on repeat. Similarly, another embedded element that Chbosky and King share in their writing is that characters who commit day-to-day vices are severely punished while there is no retribution for major sinners.

Although, Chbosky had been working on this book for the past nine years, its release comes at a time when narratives surrounding children fighting off some Satan-sponsored carnage are having a cultural moment. Imaginary Friend recalls the Netflix series Stranger Things, which is built around a group of plucky kids trying to fight evil.

An ambitious work, Imaginary Friend is an original, absorbing and surprising novel that has the potential to attract a non-traditional horror readership. Here’s to hoping we don’t have to wait another 20 years to see where Chbosky goes next.

The reviewer is a literary curator and culture writer

Imaginary Friend
By Stephen Chbosky
Grand Central, US
ISBN: 978-1538731338
720pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, April 12th, 2020