Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky – ARC review

My Rating ~ Four & a half Stars

RELEASE DATE:  1 October 2019

Format: Paperback

Pages: 706

Publisher: Hachette Australia

 

Blurb

Christopher is seven years old. Christopher is the new kid in town. Christopher has an imaginary friend.

Single mother Kate Reese is on the run. Determined to improve life for her and her son, Christopher, she flees an abusive relationship in the middle of the night with Christopher at her side. Together, they find themselves drawn to the tight-knit community of Mill Grove, Pennsylvania. It’s as far off the beaten track as they can get. Just one highway in, one highway out.

At first, it seems like the perfect place to finally settle down. Then Christopher vanishes. For six awful days, no one can find him. Until Christopher emerges from the woods at the edge of town, unharmed but not unchanged. He returns with a voice in his head only he can hear, with a mission only he can complete: Build a tree house in the woods by Christmas, or his mother and everyone in the town will never be the same again.

Soon Kate and Christopher find themselves in the fight of their lives, caught in the middle of a war playing out between good and evil, with their small town as the battleground.

 

 

Review

Thank you so much to Hachette Australia for providing me with a copy of Imaginary Friend in exchange for an honest review!

 

So I’ll preface this by saying I have never read The Perks of Being a Wallflower and had no idea who this author was before I read this book, and I’m glad.  I think a lot of people find it really difficult when they love a book and then then author crosses into another genre.  So, lucky for me, I got to experience Imaginary Friend purely for what it was – a rather terrifying horror story!

Christopher was lost in the woods for 6 days.  Six days he remembers nothing about until ‘the nice man’ showed him the way out.  No-one else saw the nice man, but Christopher still talks to him all the time, and the nice man has told Christopher he needs to build a treehouse in the woods before Christmas.  With the help of his new friends at school, that’s exactly what he intends to do.  Christopher’s mother is terrified her son is taking after his father and has no idea how to help him, or stop him from going back into the woods.  She has no idea just how terrifying things are about to get.

This book was not only creepy, it was that type of slow story building that gets under your skin,  The type you just have to keep reading, even though you know those scenes are going to replay in your head when you turn out the lights (or when your husband hisses in his sleep, exactly as you imagine the terrifying hissing lady does in this book, and he is lucky you don’t smother him with a pillow).

There were twists at the end I truly didn’t see coming and the haunting writing style kept me captivated from page one.  I’m usually a little bit intimidated by big books, because I have so many to read, but this one didn’t take me long to get through at all.  I just had to know what was going to happen at the end!

This strongly reminded me of Stephen King style writing and I think this is one King lovers should add to their TBR piles immediately!

 

 

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