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I first heard about I Will Kill Your Imaginary Friend For $200 because they were doing a giveaway on Goodreads. I didn’t win (I never do), but I had a gift card to Barnes and Noble and saw it in the store and took a chance.

IWKYIF is about a man named Ivan who can see imaginary friends. For most people their imaginary friends (IFs) disappear as they grow up. Other people have a harder time letting go. Their IFs ruin their lives in various ways, and that’s where Ivan comes in. Ivan will kill your IF for $200. Or maybe more if you look like you can afford it. Ivan has a few rules and one of them is that he will never take a child’s friend. Kids need their IFs.

Kay Washington lives with her mom, Mack. Mack is nurse and works crazy hours, so Kay spends the majority of her time alone. She puts on TV in the background (HGTV is her favorite) and plays video games on her tablet or watches her favorite show, The Eddie Video Show. She watches this show so much that Eddie becomes her imaginary friend. Eddie slowly starts to take over Kay’s life, getting her into trouble and pulling her further and further into his fantasy world. It’s clear this IF is not like the others, who are generally non violent. As things get worse, Mack contacts Ivan who has to decide if he will help Kay or not.

The book didn’t hook me from the beginning. The humor wasn’t hitting for me, but I think that it was partly because of the way I went right from Dungeon Crawler Carl to this. Ivan was a fine character, but Kay and Mack sold it for me. Kay is funny and a good kid. She loves fast food restaurants. Not the food, but the buildings and design. It was never out right stated in the book but as an autistic person I definitely saw similarities between Kay and myself.

I’m going to keep this short because A Parade of Horribles is the 8th book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series. Either you’ve made it this far in the series or you haven’t. It’s very similar to the other books, which is exactly what I was hoping for. Why change a formula that works so well?

It has been a long time since I’ve anticipated a book release, espically one that was part of a series (next up, There Are No Giant Crabs in This Novel: A Novel of Giant Crabs, coming out in November. I’m feasting this year). I forced myself to read this slowly, and I still read it in three days. I devoured it. I laughed. I cried. It’s fucking Dungeon Crawler Carl.

I really enjoyed this book. It was dark and heavy and not an 'easy' read. I think the authors prose fit the content very well. No excessive, flowery descriptions. Everything was raw and felt very real. I devoured the book in two days, I needed to know what happened next. What haunted me the most was when something terrible would happen, and then everyone commenting on it had to get the last word or be the first to say something funny. Very realistic to how the internet is these days. Just completely desensitized to everything. Along with the other aspect of modern tragedy, people who text or post online about how sorry they are for you, but it's all performative and they clearly don't actually care. Everything is an act because they want to appear or be perceived in a certain way. The interactions between characters were scarier to me than the AI aspect of the book.

Rounded down from 2.5.

I wanted to love this book so badly. The concept of killing people with craft store supplies is so fun. Not to mention the added bonus of New Creations being an obvious stand in for Hobby Lobby, because fuck HL and their shady business practices. If the book had been about 100 pages less it would’ve been great, five stars even.

Here’s an example of how reading this went

Ruth loves Abigail. Abigail is everything to Ruth. Blah blah blah for a paragraph.

Next paragraph. Abigail and Ruth are in love. They love each other so much. Blah blah blah.

Next paragraph. In love is what Abigail and Ruth are. They are lovers. Love love love.

This is the third Brom book I’ve read and it was my favorite (second fav being The Child Thief, third being Slewfoot). I love punk rock and this book captured the culture really well. A particular section I loved was the main character, Ruby, talking about how she embraced punk so that people thought she was socially strange on purpose. It gave her a place she could feel safe being herself. Relatable.

Spoiler free summary- Ruby ends up possessed by a spirit named Beel, not a demon but tied to a demon lord named Sheelbeth. Lord Sheelbeth wants to escape her prison and is using Beel to achieve that goal via the possession of Ruby. Ruby, of course, doesn’t want to be possessed and the book is about her trying to free herself.

Ruby is in a band called The Nightmares with her friend Tina. Tina was easily my favorite character in the book. She’s so punk and cool. I think Brom does a really good job of writing female characters with actual personalities.

The horror elements in this book are superb. You (the reader) get information that Ruby doesn’t have, and it really raises the suspense. It’s been a while since a book actually made me anxious and this one did it so well. Broms descriptions of the demons and creatures are creepy as hell and even without the book art I could picture them as if they were in the room with me.

I whipped though this book, which is why it gets 5🎸. I love reading Brom because you can always tell how much thought and backstory went into every character, even if we don’t get all of that background information in the writing. The writing never feels dense or pretentious, which is maybe my biggest pet peeve in fiction right now. Constant big words and pages long descriptions don’t make a good book.

https://pangobooks.com/bookstore/dovanova

Link to my bookstore (I have some good, cheap stuff on there!)