What an extraordinary novel. I thought it would be flippant, given the title. However, it is not. Instead, Robert Brockway lets his imagination loose in I Will Kill Your Imaginary Friend for $200 to examine the lives of children who lack attention for different reasons. The novel is dedicated to single parents, and our main child protagonist is a little girl named Kay whose mother loves her dearly, but is a single parent who must work constantly to maintain their small house. Thus, Kay is home alone when she’s not at school. Her loneliness and dread of quiet leads her to create an imaginary friend named Eddie Video, a character based on a YouTube channel she enjoys.

Other children develop the imaginary friends they need, and not all children come from lower income home. Some are children of parents who have elite job titles, thus making them too “important” to pay attention to their children. Brockway demonstrates that loneliness is loneliness, regardless of the money situation, but that poor children imagine monsters and wealthy children imagine friends. Kay is our main focus, the heart of the plot, and we see her at school, saying and doing everything wrong despite her best efforts: “Even when Kay was right, she was ridiculous. She struck out like a crooked nail, while everyone else was so happy being flush with the wood.” Kay is bright, imaginative, thoughtful. But not befriended.

Instead, she convinces her teacher that she’s required to check in with her mom at specific times, so Kay is allowed to have her tablet during recess. Sitting alone, Kay watches Eddie Video on YouTube, spaces out, and, from the outside, practically looks catatonic. What’s happening is she’s imagining interactions with Eddie Video, whose favorite thing is “pranks!” Eventually, he persuades Kay to do “pranks,” too, which leads her to hurt another child. After Kay is suspended, she spends even more time at home alone, and Eddie Video is there….talking to her directly. Ultimately, the prank at school was the catalyst to get Kay alone with Eddie Video, and the reader gets the jist that Eddie Video is neither as playful nor harmless as other children’s imaginary friends.

While Kay is the heart of the novel, Ivan is the “hero.” Yes, hero in quotes because he’s a worn down, poor, struggling, lonely man — I believe in his 30s? — who helps adults kill their imaginary friends that never left and are incongruous with adult life. It’s hard to hold a job or develop relationships if you have a tiny, obscene fairy saying naughty things and farting incessantly (see the fairy on the cover). Our poor “hero” is such a “nobody” that he doesn’t even go by his own name anymore. Maksim Ivanov is from Ukraine and moved to the U.S. when he was a child. His accent and cultural differences singled him out as a “weirdo,” and the other children dubbed him Ivan, assuming he was a Russian boy, someone not to be trusted.

The layers in I Will Kill Your Imaginary Friend for $200 are breathtaking. There is so much heart and sadness, joy and love, darkness and fear. Brockway’s novel is imaginative yet comments on the real issue of social classes, too. When Ivan (he goes by Ivan in the novel because he surrendered his own identity years ago) delivers food as a member of the gig economy, he’s amazed at how rich people look homeless as a trend, that the most expensive restaurant can exist next door to the poorest parts of a town.

One massive issue Ivan faces, the reason he can kill imaginary friends for weary adults, is that he can see all the imaginary friends. Typically, only the person who created the imaginary friend can see it, but Ivan is the exception — which is dangerous, because they do not like Ivan for one important reason revealed later in the novel. As a person who struggles every day seeing dangerous things that others don’t, Ivan realizes he’s terrified: “With focused effort and a lot of expensive professional therapy, one day Ivan might finally beat this phobia. But he couldn’t afford that, so he watched YouTube therapy videos by attractive people with exposed cleavage, and settled for living with it.” Isn’t that just so American?

I Will Kill Your Imaginary Friend for $200 is an immersive, original plot that both holds up a mirror and is kind to parents who can’t afford to be with their kids all the time. Brockway’s acknowledgements note that he was raised by a single father, and I can tell this is a personal story with a huge dose of imagination. I was kept guessing until the end about what would happen, and I was wrong in so many ways.