Imaginary friend / Stephen Chbosky.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A young boy is haunted by a voice in his head in this acclaimed, bestselling epic of literary horror from the author of The Perks of Being a Wallflower .



O ne of The Year's Best Books ( People, EW, Lithub, Vox, Washington Post, and more) We can swallow our fear or let our fear swallow us. 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 her child. 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 long 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 treehouse in the woods by Christmas, or his mother and everyone in the town will never be the same again. Twenty years ago, Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower made readers everywhere feel infinite. Now, Chbosky has returned with an epic work of literary horror, years in the making, whose grand scale and rich emotion redefine the genre. Read it with the lights on.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Seven-year-old Christopher is the new kid in Mill Grove, PA, the fairly secluded town where his single mother, Kate Reese, decided to settle down after leaving an abusive relationship. Christopher struggles in school, Kate needs a job, and they don't have much money, but at least they have each other. Then Christopher disappears for six days. When he emerges from the Mission Street Woods, their luck begins to improve, but Christopher is changed. He finds himself drawn back into the woods where he hears a voice and is given a mission. As he works on his task, a flu breaks out and anger spreads throughout the town. A war is coming and it's beyond what the residents ever could have imagined. This doorstopper literary horror novel is thematically rich and feels cinematic. Short chapters following numerous distinct characters keep the pace quick. Horror is imbued throughout both in gory, terrifying fantasies as well as in the more realistic horror of abuse and neglect. Christian imagery and symbols are sometimes heavy-handed. While the sense of immediacy to keep hearts pounding is always prevalent, the last third of the book feels overly drawn out. VERDICT This epic tale of ultimate good vs. evil is a bit long-winded but still impressive in scope and truly scary.--Jenna Friebel, Oak Park P.L., IL

Publishers Weekly Review

Chbosky's ambitious second novel (after 1999's The Perks of Being a Wallflower) is a tale of good vs. evil that never gels. Seven-year-old Christopher and his mother, Kate, move to Mill Grove, Pa., after Kate leaves her abusive boyfriend. Kate gets a job at an old folks' home, and Christopher, who has a learning disability, starts second grade and makes friends with a boy nicknamed Special Ed. One day, Christopher disappears into the Mission Street Woods; he emerges six days later, unscathed--but his learning disability has disappeared. Kate then wins the lottery and buys a new house bordering the woods, where a disembodied voice tells Christopher to build a tree house. Before long, Christopher gets debilitating headaches and strange revelations, a mysterious sickness spreads throughout the community, and a terrifying entity dubbed "the hissing lady" lurks around town. Chbosky brings deep humanity to his characters and creates genuinely unsettling tableaux, including a nightmarish otherworld that Christopher accesses via his treehouse, but considerable repetition extends the narrative while diminishing its impact. Christian overtones (some subtle, others less so) are pervasive, especially in the finale, and add little to the story. This doorstopper is long on words but short on execution. Agent: Eric Simonoff, William Morris Endeavor. (Oct.)

Booklist Review

Chbosky's long-awaited sophomore novel (after The Perks of Being a Wallflower, 1999) is less emotionally charged YA and more reminiscent of the epic novels of Stephen King (like 1984's The Talisman). Widow Kate and her 7-year-old son Christopher are fleeing her abusive boyfriend, and they seem to find a soft landing in a small western Pennsylvania town. It quickly becomes apparent that they have been drawn here by forces both loving and malevolent to stop the opening of a portal to hell. Christopher's imaginary friend, who, after he went missing for days, led him out of the woods, seems to hold the key to the terrors that plague their neighbors. With multiple points of view that probe the thoughts and nightmares of characters from all over town, this is an immersive read that walks the line between dark fantasy and horror. With its highly precocious young hero, the novel reads like a season of Stranger Things. Suggest it to readers who enjoyed Thomas Olde Heuvelt's HexDisappearance at Devil's Rock (2016), or anything by Amy Lukavics. HIGH DEMAND BACKSTORY: This book will sell itself to readers who have waited twenty years for a new novel from Chbosky, but horror fans will also be curious.--Becky Spratford Copyright 2010 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

Two decades after his debut novel, The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999), Chbosky returns with a creepy horror yarn that would do Stephen King proud."Mom? Will he find us?" So asks young Christopher of his mother, Kate, who has spirited him away from her abusive mate and found a tiny town in Pennsylvania in which to hide out. Naturally, her secret is not safebut it's small potatoes compared to what Christopher begins to detect as he settles in to a new life and a new school. His friends, like him, are casualties, and that's just fine for the malevolent forces that await out in the woods and even in the sky, the latter the place where Christopher comes into contact with a smiling, talking cloud that lures him off into the ever dark woods. "That's when he heard a little kid crying," writes Chbosky, and that's just about the time the reader will want to check to be sure that no one is hiding behind the chairor worse, and about the scariest trope of all, which Chbosky naturally puts to work, under the bed. Christopher disappears only to turn up a little less than a week later, decidedly transformed. But then, so's everyone in Mill Grove, including his elementary school teacher, who harbors an ominous thought: "Christopher was such a nice little boy. It was too bad that he was going to die now." As things begin to go truly haywire, Chbosky's prose begins to break down into fragments and odd punctuation and spelling, suggesting that someone other than the author is in control of the fraught world he's depicting. One wonders why Kate doesn't just fire up the station wagon and head down the Pennsylvania Turnpike rather than face things like a "hissing lady" and a townsman who has suddenly begun to sport daggerlike teeth, but that's the nature of a good scary storyand this one is excellent.A pleasing book for those who like to scare themselves silly, one to read with the lights on and the door bolted. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.