Stephen Chbosky Returns With Lukewarm Horror Novel ‘Imaginary Friend’

Does Stephen Chbosky know what he ended up writing, that is, did he read the final product? Did an editor read the final product? It’s difficult to say, because “Imaginary Friend,” his first novel since “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” is not a horror novel — even though that’s how it’s being marketed. It certainly asks difficult questions, but having horror elements does not necessarily make it a novel of that genre. It’s the “squares are rectangles, but rectangles aren’t squares” argument, but applied to books. It’s a shame that the novel was put in this category, because Chbosky might have been able to further develop his underlying religious themes had there been fewer distracting elements in the way.

To start with the good parts: Chbosky knows how to spin a good story. Christopher, the seven year-old protagonist, and his mother, Kate Reese, move to Mill Grove, Penn, to escape her abusive boyfriend. Christopher ends up in the woods, starts hearing voices, becomes a genius overnight, and figures out that the imaginary world which he can see in his dreams is actually Hell. One character becomes pregnant despite not having ever had sex, while another woman attempts to drown herself in a gallon of paint. Both occurrences, in the larger context of the story, are deeply unsettling — in a good way.

As a screenwriter firmly rooted in the TV and movie industries, Chbosky has also been clearly taking notes from his peers: Christopher spends a good chunk of the novel with a nosebleed à la “Stranger Things” from the exertion needed to save the world. “Carcasses of trees” was an excellent image about a quarter of the way into the book, and the idea of God as a murderer was one well worth exploring.

All these positive elements do not nearly disguise, however, the larger problems of the novel, the most significant of which is its incorrect categorization. There are certainly enough gory moments and jump scares — though the effect of the latter on the page is limited at best — to qualify it as a horror novel, but Chbosky unfortunately falls flat. Amazon.com calls it “literary horror,” which, in addition to being meaningless, seems like an attempt to dress up the genre simply because the author happens to be a respected screenwriter and wrote one of the — if not “the” — books about being a teenager in America.

Part of the reason that “Imaginary Friend” can’t quite be considered horror is because of its pacing — which is directly tied to the novel’s length. Yes, it’s true that other successful additions to the genre are upwards of a thousand pages, but the way their plots develop is markedly different. “Imaginary Friend” may have a climax, but there are so many little ones that the reader is left wondering if “that was it.” The result is a novel that moves slowly all the way through, rather than accelerating at precise moments. The hospital scenes, the escape scenes, and the car chase scenes blend into one another so seamlessly that their purpose is lost and the reader’s attention is gone. Horror novels should not be boring, but this one was.

Chbosky tried on a lot of hats while writing this book. There are moments in the novel when Christopher, the seven-year-old who becomes almost omnipotent, thinks about God’s love and the difference between making decisions out of fear and out of love — all very cosmic stuff, and one can easily see the influences of “Perks of Being a Wallflower.” Sometimes Chbosky’s own voice comes through in moments when the narrator says quips like “the touché part was silent.” And there are larger moments of cultural commentary, like when Mary Katherine — our resident Virgin Mary — wonders, “Why was everything involving a girl’s body so degrading?”

Ultimately, however, he didn’t pick one, and tried to do everything, yielding an unwieldy book that clocks in at over 700 pages. The page length itself is not as daunting as attempting to be engaged from start to finish, which was, admittedly, not easy. Emma Watson supposedly disliked the original ending of “Imaginary Friend”: One only wonders what it was considering the one he ended up publishing was so unsatisfying. It’s a shame, because Chbosky clearly has good ideas, and is engaging with religion in fiction in a way that is not often seen in the literary world. Perhaps scaling back the page count and honing in on one specific message would have been a better idea.

—Staff writer Cassandra Luca can be reached at cassandra.luca@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @cassandraluca_