He also suffers from social anxiety, making him the ultimate misfit. Given his shy nature and dyslexia, which affects his learning ability, he finds adjusting to his new school difficult. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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. It is a spine-tingling, uplifting yarn which would do Stephen King proud.Ĭhbosky starts the story with an enigmatic prologue that takes the reader 50 years into the past before the primary narrative begins.
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. 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.
0 kommentar(er)
