Skeleton Keys: The Unimaginary Friend

Guy Bass's Skeleton Keys: The Unimaginary Friend is a spooky, funny story for 7 year olds about a boy whose imaginary friend turns up in person.

What happens

It's Ben Bunsen's tenth birthday. Invitations have gone out to nearly every child on Grundy Island. There's bunting, there are balloons over every inch of the floor, there are fireworks waiting in the garden. Ben's dad has told him to stay up in his attic bedroom so he can make a big entrance.

He comes down the stairs. His mum and dad are standing in the middle of all those balloons, wearing party hats. Nobody else came.

It's a horrible little moment and it sits there for a while. Then Ben's dad says the wrong thing, loudly, about Ben being too old for imaginary friends. Ben runs out of the house and down to the beach.

And there, for the first time, he imagines the Gorblimey properly. Real, not pretend.

The Gorblimey is worth the wait. He's round and hairy and so black he seems to drink up any light that touches him, he's got curled horns, and there's a candle flame floating above his head that changes colour with his mood. Also he bounces like a rubber ball. He can't talk, he hoots and chirrups, and Ben understands him perfectly anyway. The pair of them go bouncing across the island, past the burnt-out pier, past the deserted fairground, past the zoo with its one sad giraffe.

Then somebody else turns up on the clifftop. Tall, impossibly thin, in a blue tailcoat and a three-peaked hat, and he already knows what's happened. He's even got a word for it. Unimaginary.

And then he takes his hat off.

Your reader will probably work out what's under it a page before Ben does, which is most of the fun.

It's shelved as scary and that's fair. The skull, the milk-white eyeballs and "I have come for you" at the end of a chapter are a genuine jolt, though it's the friendly sort of fright with a joke never far behind. A seven year old who takes things to bed with them might want the landing light on.

The quieter thing to know about is the party. A child standing in a room nobody came to is the saddest page here, and some readers will feel that one keenly.

What to read next

If monsters and daftness together are the thing, The Spider's Lair is another by the same author. It opens with a carriage racing through the rain to a mad professor's castle, and a small stitched-together creature called Stitch Head who lives among the monsters and is far better company than any of them.