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rbreade's review
Off-the-charts inventive world-building and whip smart writing by Hayes, who blends The Velveteen Rabbit, Toy Story, and the tropes of noir detective fiction into a fizzy-lifting concoction that manages real heart and emotional depth. Welcome to the Stillreal. Meet your guide, Tippy the Toy Triceratops, plush-yellow resident detective of Playtime Town, where someone from the Real is murdering Ideas...
smitchy's review
3.0
This mind-bending blend of crime noir and comic fantasy is a must for fans of Jasper Fforde!
Tippy is the best detective in the Stillreal. He also happens to be a bright yellow plush triceratops. He was once someone's best friend - a detective imagined to help make sense of the world but one tragic event changed everything an Tippy was set aside: Still loved, still real, but no longer required. When that happened Tippy when where all abandoned but fiercely imagined ideas go; The Stillreal.
Setting out on a case, Tippy discovers a nightmare newly arrived in the Stillreal, somehow chased out of his person's head by a creature that terrifies it. Tippy doesn't take the new arrival's ramblings too seriously, afterall everyone is a bit disorientated when they first arrive. But when the nightmare is attacked Tippy discovers that this new creature can do the impossible: Kill an idea, permanently.
With time running out Tippy has to face his own deamons and rally the beings of the Stillreal to end this creature and help everyone - real and imagined alike.
Tippy is a wonderful blend of hard bitten noir-style detective and the most innocent of childhood pleasures; with a tragic backstory, PTSD, and addiction to root-beer floats. He brings comfort to villans and shows kindness to nightmares. The fights he gets into are both action-packed and strangely, innocently, violent - Tippy gets the stuffing knocked out of him more than once!
This is hard bitten crime without any blood, and there is nothing that would cause me to hesitate in giving this book to an early teen reader. However, I feel an older audience might enjoy the play of ideas more.
I would love to see some more of Tippy and his imaginary friends and see the world fleshed out more in future adventures.
Pure, escapist fun for those who love comic fantasy.
Tippy is the best detective in the Stillreal. He also happens to be a bright yellow plush triceratops. He was once someone's best friend - a detective imagined to help make sense of the world but one tragic event changed everything an Tippy was set aside: Still loved, still real, but no longer required. When that happened Tippy when where all abandoned but fiercely imagined ideas go; The Stillreal.
Setting out on a case, Tippy discovers a nightmare newly arrived in the Stillreal, somehow chased out of his person's head by a creature that terrifies it. Tippy doesn't take the new arrival's ramblings too seriously, afterall everyone is a bit disorientated when they first arrive. But when the nightmare is attacked Tippy discovers that this new creature can do the impossible: Kill an idea, permanently.
With time running out Tippy has to face his own deamons and rally the beings of the Stillreal to end this creature and help everyone - real and imagined alike.
Tippy is a wonderful blend of hard bitten noir-style detective and the most innocent of childhood pleasures; with a tragic backstory, PTSD, and addiction to root-beer floats. He brings comfort to villans and shows kindness to nightmares. The fights he gets into are both action-packed and strangely, innocently, violent - Tippy gets the stuffing knocked out of him more than once!
This is hard bitten crime without any blood, and there is nothing that would cause me to hesitate in giving this book to an early teen reader. However, I feel an older audience might enjoy the play of ideas more.
I would love to see some more of Tippy and his imaginary friends and see the world fleshed out more in future adventures.
Pure, escapist fun for those who love comic fantasy.
kvltprincess's review
5.0
I loved this book! The premise is so original - a noir story with imaginary friends. I love the way the characters of the Stillreal behave, based on how their creators saw them. For instance, the way Big Business only speaks in business talk, and how Tippy hates swearing. All the characters are instantly lovable in their own way. There could be sequels based on the ending, and I sure hope there are, because The Imaginary Corpse is charming as all heck!
madiemayhem's review
4.0
"Toy Story meets Sin City"
It's a stuffed yellow dinosaur who is a detective and likes to go a few rounds in the dryer to ease his anxiety, what more could you ask for?!
Also brb, as I have to go give all my imaginary friends a mental hug
Really good book! Loved the way it was written and I love the concept of it. Though sometimes that concept was a *little* too hard to follow. You have to enjoy it at base level and not think about it too much.
PS. If a stuffed animal can ask what pronouns people prefer so can you Karen.
It's a stuffed yellow dinosaur who is a detective and likes to go a few rounds in the dryer to ease his anxiety, what more could you ask for?!
Also brb, as I have to go give all my imaginary friends a mental hug
Really good book! Loved the way it was written and I love the concept of it. Though sometimes that concept was a *little* too hard to follow. You have to enjoy it at base level and not think about it too much.
PS. If a stuffed animal can ask what pronouns people prefer so can you Karen.
cursed_sapphire's review
adventurous
dark
emotional
funny
mysterious
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
One of the most creative stories I've ever read. Don't let the fact that the main character is a plush yellow dinosaur fool you- this is a tense mystery novel with a lot of suspense. I'd say it's a film noir in a Toontown-esque world, great for fans of Roger Rabbit.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Abandonment
Moderate: Injury/Injury detail, Panic attacks/disorders, Death, and Murder
Minor: Police brutality, Grief, Kidnapping, Violence, Car accident, and Death of parent
siavahda's review against another edition
5.0
Review to come, but this is without question one of the best books I have ever read.
Aaaaaaaaaand, HERE IS MY REVIEW.
Gods above, this was one incredible ride! I finished it in just under 24 hours – and it only took me that long because I had to break for Monday’s workday. But Imaginary Corpse is pretty literally unputdownable.
My mind is so blown.
Imaginary Corpse is the book I didn’t know I wanted. No: didn’t know I needed. I’ve read stories by younger authors, but this is the first book that has ever struck me as Millennial Fantasy, as a book written by someone who understood my generation, for people of my generation. What the hell does that mean, you ask? It’s everything – from the cynical-optimistic voice of the narrator Tippy, to the casually diverse cast of fabulous characters; the normalisation of the question ‘What are your pronouns?’, to the wry black humour; the acknowledgement of trauma, and the rock-solid bonds tying friends and Friends together; the defiant absurdity that’s nonetheless delighted to poke fun at itself – and the sheer awe and wonder and magic of the human imagination, and all that it can create.
I mean – let’s look at my exhibit A for this argument. Tippy, being a yellow plushie dinosaur, has a unique form of self-care: he takes a turn in a dryer. As in, a tumble-dryer machine.
Please point me towards the Millennial who will not read that and immediately think ‘#MOOD’? The moment I described that part of the novel, my husband (a fellow Millennial, ftr) instantly lit up with an ‘I want to go in the dryer too!’ There is just something about the idea of it – the wackiness, the cleverness, the appeal to how many of us are so tired and long for some self-care ourselves – that strikes a chord I haven’t seen struck before.
The entire book is like that. I can’t drop too many examples because honestly, the sheer delight of discovering them for yourself is not something I want to deprive fellow readers of – but the tumble-dryer is the least of it. Superheroines and villainesses making out in alleyways. Big Business. A literally American eagle. Again and again this book made me giggle or laugh out loud as Hayes spun older tropes into something fresh and clever and invented completely new ones – many of which playfully mock themselves and invite you to join in on the fun. I could not stop myself from sharing snippets with the hubby while I was reading, because so many lines or concepts were just that brilliant. Discovering just what it is hard-boiled detectives drink in Playtime Town when they’ve had a rough day – I think that was the moment I knew I was going to love this book hard.
(And no, I’m not going to tell you what they drink. Read the book yourself to find out!)
Imaginary Corpse is not a comedy, though. Hayes’ twisty brilliance might remind me The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – except with magic instead of spaceships – but he also tackles harder and darker topics like a yellow triceratops charging at a bully. As mentioned above, this is a book where the first questions upon meeting a new person are ‘What can I call you, and what are your pronouns?’ The latter is hardly a common question in most spaces, but in Tippy’s word of the Stillreal, it’s completely normalised. Consent and choice are big themes here too, in many nuances, right down to the sanctity of personal space and gaining permission before entering someone else’s. Hayes’ characters face failure and grieving, and given the premise – that the Stillreal realm is populated by Friends who lost their creators in one way or another, usually to some flavour of tragedy – many, if not all of them, have trauma. Tippy himself has trauma-triggers – and this is known and accommodated by his friends. There’s no judgement here for survivors, no matter what scars they made it through with.
And I want to stress again: all of this is normalised. This isn’t Hayes hitting anyone over the head with The Liberal Agenda; it’s just how his characters talk to each other, and live alongside one another. I’m sure he made the conscious decision to write this book the way he did, but there’s nothing preachy or lecturing about any of it. Hayes makes such a small deal about it that I had to do a double-take more than once – it all flows so naturally that if you’re not on the lookout for it, you might not even consciously notice. It’s just one more feature of a really, really good story.
Which, can we take a second to appreciate how amazing this whole premise actually is??? Ideas – not just imaginary friends, but fictional characters and comics that were never drawn and movies that were never made – that are abandoned or lost have their own dimension, and their own societies, and our first-person narrator is a stuffed yellow triceratops. I want to see the inside of Hayes’ imagination so badly, because I have no idea how anyone could come up with all of this. I mean, the little premise summary I just wrote for you is very simplistic, because Spoilers, but – the way a Person’s experiences affect their Friends and Ideas, even once those Ideas move to the Stillreal; the existence of memories and future-memories; all the ways in which new Friends can be created and come into being… Does Hayes have a background in psychology? Because all of this reminded me of Pixar’s Inside Out (2015), except richer, darker, and more complicated (and diverse). I remember reading that one of the impacts of that movie was that it gave children struggling with mental health issues a way of expressing what they were feeling – doctors and nurses were giving them toys of those characters with which they could explain what was going on inside them. Imaginary Corpse is kind of like that in the way it pulls from psychology and neurology and social sciences as the inspiration/basis for some of its worldbuilding. It is, to say the least, freaking impressive.
This is also a fiercely hopepunk story. I mentioned already that the characters, particularly Tippy himself, have to deal with some dark stuff; with failures and regrets and even depression. It’s not grimdark – there’s too much loveliness, too much to giggle about, too many reasons to hug this book to your chest and not let go. But there are darker parts, parts that will rip your heart out, parts that will make you tear up if you have a working soul. Parts that tap a little too deeply into the feeling of hopelessness that is the undercurrent of so many lives right now. But Imaginary Corpse…
Look: there’s this amazing scene, in Catherynne Valente’s The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, where September, the main character, meets a soap golem who explains that over time, a person’s bravery gets tarnished, and dirty, and worn-out. And every now and then you have to scrub it clean so it can be all shiny again and you have the bravery and strength to take on the world again.
The Imaginary Corpse is a book that washes your bravery clean again. It gently wipes at your eyes and heart and shows you how to feel wonder again, too; how to find joy in beautiful things and wonderful people and all the incredible things an imagination can do. And it does it while acknowledging how fucking hard that can be, which is what makes the message so potent and so true.
I am slowly assembling a ‘best fantasies of the decade’ list, to be published near the end of the year. Imaginary Corpse is going to be on it.
You are not ready for this level of awesome. But you should absolutely read this book anyway.
Aaaaaaaaaand, HERE IS MY REVIEW.
Gods above, this was one incredible ride! I finished it in just under 24 hours – and it only took me that long because I had to break for Monday’s workday. But Imaginary Corpse is pretty literally unputdownable.
My mind is so blown.
Imaginary Corpse is the book I didn’t know I wanted. No: didn’t know I needed. I’ve read stories by younger authors, but this is the first book that has ever struck me as Millennial Fantasy, as a book written by someone who understood my generation, for people of my generation. What the hell does that mean, you ask? It’s everything – from the cynical-optimistic voice of the narrator Tippy, to the casually diverse cast of fabulous characters; the normalisation of the question ‘What are your pronouns?’, to the wry black humour; the acknowledgement of trauma, and the rock-solid bonds tying friends and Friends together; the defiant absurdity that’s nonetheless delighted to poke fun at itself – and the sheer awe and wonder and magic of the human imagination, and all that it can create.
I mean – let’s look at my exhibit A for this argument. Tippy, being a yellow plushie dinosaur, has a unique form of self-care: he takes a turn in a dryer. As in, a tumble-dryer machine.
Please point me towards the Millennial who will not read that and immediately think ‘#MOOD’? The moment I described that part of the novel, my husband (a fellow Millennial, ftr) instantly lit up with an ‘I want to go in the dryer too!’ There is just something about the idea of it – the wackiness, the cleverness, the appeal to how many of us are so tired and long for some self-care ourselves – that strikes a chord I haven’t seen struck before.
The entire book is like that. I can’t drop too many examples because honestly, the sheer delight of discovering them for yourself is not something I want to deprive fellow readers of – but the tumble-dryer is the least of it. Superheroines and villainesses making out in alleyways. Big Business. A literally American eagle. Again and again this book made me giggle or laugh out loud as Hayes spun older tropes into something fresh and clever and invented completely new ones – many of which playfully mock themselves and invite you to join in on the fun. I could not stop myself from sharing snippets with the hubby while I was reading, because so many lines or concepts were just that brilliant. Discovering just what it is hard-boiled detectives drink in Playtime Town when they’ve had a rough day – I think that was the moment I knew I was going to love this book hard.
(And no, I’m not going to tell you what they drink. Read the book yourself to find out!)
Imaginary Corpse is not a comedy, though. Hayes’ twisty brilliance might remind me The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – except with magic instead of spaceships – but he also tackles harder and darker topics like a yellow triceratops charging at a bully. As mentioned above, this is a book where the first questions upon meeting a new person are ‘What can I call you, and what are your pronouns?’ The latter is hardly a common question in most spaces, but in Tippy’s word of the Stillreal, it’s completely normalised. Consent and choice are big themes here too, in many nuances, right down to the sanctity of personal space and gaining permission before entering someone else’s. Hayes’ characters face failure and grieving, and given the premise – that the Stillreal realm is populated by Friends who lost their creators in one way or another, usually to some flavour of tragedy – many, if not all of them, have trauma. Tippy himself has trauma-triggers – and this is known and accommodated by his friends. There’s no judgement here for survivors, no matter what scars they made it through with.
And I want to stress again: all of this is normalised. This isn’t Hayes hitting anyone over the head with The Liberal Agenda; it’s just how his characters talk to each other, and live alongside one another. I’m sure he made the conscious decision to write this book the way he did, but there’s nothing preachy or lecturing about any of it. Hayes makes such a small deal about it that I had to do a double-take more than once – it all flows so naturally that if you’re not on the lookout for it, you might not even consciously notice. It’s just one more feature of a really, really good story.
Which, can we take a second to appreciate how amazing this whole premise actually is??? Ideas – not just imaginary friends, but fictional characters and comics that were never drawn and movies that were never made – that are abandoned or lost have their own dimension, and their own societies, and our first-person narrator is a stuffed yellow triceratops. I want to see the inside of Hayes’ imagination so badly, because I have no idea how anyone could come up with all of this. I mean, the little premise summary I just wrote for you is very simplistic, because Spoilers, but – the way a Person’s experiences affect their Friends and Ideas, even once those Ideas move to the Stillreal; the existence of memories and future-memories; all the ways in which new Friends can be created and come into being… Does Hayes have a background in psychology? Because all of this reminded me of Pixar’s Inside Out (2015), except richer, darker, and more complicated (and diverse). I remember reading that one of the impacts of that movie was that it gave children struggling with mental health issues a way of expressing what they were feeling – doctors and nurses were giving them toys of those characters with which they could explain what was going on inside them. Imaginary Corpse is kind of like that in the way it pulls from psychology and neurology and social sciences as the inspiration/basis for some of its worldbuilding. It is, to say the least, freaking impressive.
This is also a fiercely hopepunk story. I mentioned already that the characters, particularly Tippy himself, have to deal with some dark stuff; with failures and regrets and even depression. It’s not grimdark – there’s too much loveliness, too much to giggle about, too many reasons to hug this book to your chest and not let go. But there are darker parts, parts that will rip your heart out, parts that will make you tear up if you have a working soul. Parts that tap a little too deeply into the feeling of hopelessness that is the undercurrent of so many lives right now. But Imaginary Corpse…
Look: there’s this amazing scene, in Catherynne Valente’s The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, where September, the main character, meets a soap golem who explains that over time, a person’s bravery gets tarnished, and dirty, and worn-out. And every now and then you have to scrub it clean so it can be all shiny again and you have the bravery and strength to take on the world again.
The Imaginary Corpse is a book that washes your bravery clean again. It gently wipes at your eyes and heart and shows you how to feel wonder again, too; how to find joy in beautiful things and wonderful people and all the incredible things an imagination can do. And it does it while acknowledging how fucking hard that can be, which is what makes the message so potent and so true.
I am slowly assembling a ‘best fantasies of the decade’ list, to be published near the end of the year. Imaginary Corpse is going to be on it.
You are not ready for this level of awesome. But you should absolutely read this book anyway.
charlotekerstenauthor's review
'‘'At bay’ isn’t the same thing as ‘gone.'"
So What’s It About?
Most ideas fade away when we're done with them. Some we love enough to become Real. But what about the ones we love, and walk away from?
Tippy the triceratops was once a little girl's imaginary friend, a dinosaur detective who could help her make sense of the world. But when her father died, Tippy fell into the Stillreal, the underbelly of the Imagination, where discarded ideas go when they're too Real to disappear. Now, he passes time doing detective work for other unwanted ideas - until Tippy runs into The Man in the Coat, a nightmare monster who can do the impossible: kill an idea permanently. Now Tippy must overcome his own trauma and solve the case, before there's nothing left but imaginary corpses.
What I Thought
My favorite part of this book by far is the inventiveness of the Stillreal, which I think is an amazing concept with the potential to be the setting for dozens of completely unique stories. The general premise is fleshed out with plenty of great details that bring it to life and make it seem like a truly vibrant, diverse place. In addition to the sheer inventiveness and scope of creativity, I really appreciate that the existence of the Stillreal and the Friends is fundamentally based on their peoples’ experiences of loss and trauma - and therefore the friends’ experiences of secondary loss and trauma.
This is an underlying theme that gets the most attention in the way that Tippy harshly criticizes himself and fundamentally believes that the other Friends don’t need or care about him. I somehow (????????????????) did an r/fantasy convention panel with Tyler Hayes earlier this year and really appreciated his answers about how his own experiences with social anxiety and trauma informed his writing of Tippy’s experience. It’s a portrayal that feels very true and genuine, and to me it stands as the book’s other great strength alongside the world-building. I love Tippy’s growth in this regard - by the end of the book he realizes how important he is to his friends and community and vows that his person’s terrible experiences will not destroy or control him.
I only have a few minor quibbles - principally, I’m kind of confused about how they end up catching The Man In the Coat. He gives up when the police officer arrests him, but he doesn’t give up earlier in the story when they catch him in a cage. This is explained in the text by Tippy realizing that The Man In the Coat acts according to his person’s conceptualization of “what criminals do,” but I just don’t quite understand why he gave up in one situation and not the other. It’s entirely possible that I just misread or missed something here, and I’d be glad to hear anyone else’s understanding of this. Otherwise, Tippy’s voice feels a little strange to me at some points - he’s supposed to be a cynical, quippy, hard-boiled detective but a lot of what he says doesn’t really land that way at all even when Tippy seems to feel that it does. He states that his person made him as cynical as she knew how to as a very young girl and this basically explains why he comes off the way he does, but it does sometimes feel a little awkward. There is also a LOT of exposition. Finally, once I noticed how many times characters are described as snorting, smirking and sneering I really couldn’t stop noticing it. Overall, though, I’ve never read anything like this before and it definitely scratched an itch I didn’t know was there. I’m all for more genuine yet quirky reads about mental health struggles in deeply inventive settings.
So What’s It About?
Most ideas fade away when we're done with them. Some we love enough to become Real. But what about the ones we love, and walk away from?
Tippy the triceratops was once a little girl's imaginary friend, a dinosaur detective who could help her make sense of the world. But when her father died, Tippy fell into the Stillreal, the underbelly of the Imagination, where discarded ideas go when they're too Real to disappear. Now, he passes time doing detective work for other unwanted ideas - until Tippy runs into The Man in the Coat, a nightmare monster who can do the impossible: kill an idea permanently. Now Tippy must overcome his own trauma and solve the case, before there's nothing left but imaginary corpses.
What I Thought
My favorite part of this book by far is the inventiveness of the Stillreal, which I think is an amazing concept with the potential to be the setting for dozens of completely unique stories. The general premise is fleshed out with plenty of great details that bring it to life and make it seem like a truly vibrant, diverse place. In addition to the sheer inventiveness and scope of creativity, I really appreciate that the existence of the Stillreal and the Friends is fundamentally based on their peoples’ experiences of loss and trauma - and therefore the friends’ experiences of secondary loss and trauma.
This is an underlying theme that gets the most attention in the way that Tippy harshly criticizes himself and fundamentally believes that the other Friends don’t need or care about him. I somehow (????????????????) did an r/fantasy convention panel with Tyler Hayes earlier this year and really appreciated his answers about how his own experiences with social anxiety and trauma informed his writing of Tippy’s experience. It’s a portrayal that feels very true and genuine, and to me it stands as the book’s other great strength alongside the world-building. I love Tippy’s growth in this regard - by the end of the book he realizes how important he is to his friends and community and vows that his person’s terrible experiences will not destroy or control him.
I only have a few minor quibbles - principally, I’m kind of confused about how they end up catching The Man In the Coat. He gives up when the police officer arrests him, but he doesn’t give up earlier in the story when they catch him in a cage. This is explained in the text by Tippy realizing that The Man In the Coat acts according to his person’s conceptualization of “what criminals do,” but I just don’t quite understand why he gave up in one situation and not the other. It’s entirely possible that I just misread or missed something here, and I’d be glad to hear anyone else’s understanding of this. Otherwise, Tippy’s voice feels a little strange to me at some points - he’s supposed to be a cynical, quippy, hard-boiled detective but a lot of what he says doesn’t really land that way at all even when Tippy seems to feel that it does. He states that his person made him as cynical as she knew how to as a very young girl and this basically explains why he comes off the way he does, but it does sometimes feel a little awkward. There is also a LOT of exposition. Finally, once I noticed how many times characters are described as snorting, smirking and sneering I really couldn’t stop noticing it. Overall, though, I’ve never read anything like this before and it definitely scratched an itch I didn’t know was there. I’m all for more genuine yet quirky reads about mental health struggles in deeply inventive settings.
leebass7's review against another edition
In a land where thoughts and ideas are given form, Detective Tippy, a toy triceratops, traverses the world of the Still Real in search of the thing murdering imaginary friends.
There was something just quite childish about this, and not because it’s about imaginary friends. It just felt very PG. Perhaps would’ve worked better marketed as a YA novel.
This wasn’t written badly at all, similar ideas have just been explored much better already, like in Happy or Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Stuck with it for 75% but it just became quite sappy towards the end
teallb's review
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0