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Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
Stephen Chbosky wrote and directed the feature film adaptation of his award-winning novel, New York Times bestselling, The Perks of Being a Wallflower. He has worked in film and television, on projects including the film version of the smash-hit musical Rent; the TV show Jericho; and others. He also edited Pieces, a collection of short stories for Pocket Books.
Chbosky graduated from the University of Southern California's Filmic Writing Program. His first film, The Four Corners of Nowhere, premiered at Sundance Film Festival.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's 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
Guardian Review
The long-awaited follow-up to the YA bestseller The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a bloated homage to Stephen King. "Dear friend," writes Charlie, at the beginning of Stephen Chbosky's much-beloved coming-of-age novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999), "I am writing to you because she said you listen and understand." Charlie, Chbosky's troubled teenage "wallflower", pours out his heart to this friend in a series of letters trying to make sense of his life, but we learn nothing more about him or her. Two decades on, the friend in Chbosky's follow-up is even more mysterious. Seven-year-old Christopher Reese and his single mother, Kate, arrive in the small town of Mill Grove, Pennsylvania, running from their past. "Deep down, Christopher thought maybe she picked it because it seemed tucked away from the rest of the world. One highway in. One highway out. Surrounded by trees." Christopher is a good kid, but he's dyslexic and struggles at school; Kate is on the brink financially, piling up bills and living in a motel. Then, bullied and miserable at school, Christopher notices a collection of clouds that look like a face. He follows the face, and finds himself lost in the woods. Six days later, he emerges - suddenly top of his class, and talking about the "nice man" who led him out. It turns out there's a whole other world lying behind Mill Grove, "an imaginary world filled with hissing ladies and mailbox people with mouths sewn shut and eyes closed with zippers", one Christopher has found his way to, and where his new friend, the nice man whom nobody else can see but who keeps on whispering to him, needs his help. There are elements of Imaginary Friend that are genuinely frightening: as the nice man talks Christopher into building a tree house - which, incidentally, he and his gang of friends pull off with amazing skill for a group of seven-year-olds - the real and imaginary worlds of Mill Grove begin to overlap, and the bad things that lurk around this town are gradually revealed. There's the hissing lady: "she turned to teeth and a hissing mouth. Worse than the Wicked Witch. Worse than anything. Four legs like a dog. Or a long neck like a giraffe. Hssss." The man who lies inside the hollow log. The couple who can't stop kissing, blood running from their mouths. The children with mouths sewn shut. Christopher battles with sleep, which would take him into the arms of the hissing lady, and the residents of the real town start to get sicker, and angrier. Reading this book alone in the house, late at night, I will admit to a thud of fear at a bump downstairs, and a rush to switch all the lights on. But there are only so many carnivorous children and menacing deer a reader can take before becoming inured to their terrors, and after a while Imaginary Friend drifts into repetition. Christopher and his friends - and the adults in the story - are well drawn, but Chbosky is stage-managing a lot of characters, and as he moves through the gradual disintegration of each of their realities, over 720 pages, his story slows, and slows. That's not to diss the blockbuster horror novel - my shelves are lined with Stephen King, and there are elements of King here (small town, group of young boys, evil lurking beneath). But if you're going to pay homage to the master, you're going to have to do it better. Chbosky also stumbles when it comes to his register. Writing mostly from the perspective of a seven-year-old, he's clearly tried to simplify, to imply the worldview of a child. Over the course of the novel, this starts to grate. "It felt like there was a monster in there. Or something else. Something that hissed. The hiss reminded him of a baby rattle. But not from a baby. From a rattlesnake." Or: "That's when the snake jumped out. It was a rattler. Coiled. Hissing. Hissss. Hissss. The sheriff backed away. The snake slithered toward him. Hissing like a baby's rattle. The sheriff stumbled on a log and fell. The rattler came at him. Its fangs out. Ready to strike. The sheriff pulled out his revolver just as the snake jumped for his face. Bang. The snake's head exploded with the bullet." This overabundance of full stops becomes infuriating, as does the regular use of the line-break to create menace (or not, as the case may be): He reached to unlock the doorknob. Until it began to turn from the other side. Chbosky, who in the years since his debut was published has been in Hollywood, screenwriting the live-action Beauty and the Beast and directing the film adaptation of Wonder by RJ Palacio, is ambitious, to say the least, increasingly tingeing his story with Christian symbolism as the population of his small town goes into meltdown. All the elements are here to create something truly scary: it just needs to be boiled down, fine-tuned - cut, basically.
Kirkus 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.
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