Imaginary Friend by Stephen Chbosky review – lost in the woods

“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.

• Imaginary Friend is published by Orion (£20). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.