Reflecting Day: I Will Kill Your Imaginary Friend for $200 is here!🌭 (Patreon)

It’s release week for my new book, I Will Kill Your Imaginary Friend for $200. You know this. I’ve been threatening you in legally actionable ways for the last year. I will continue to threaten you in legally actionable ways for months to come. If anybody tells me “oh, I didn’t know you had a new book out” I will physically attack them with all of my might.

What you might not know – because my plugs focus entirely on blackmail and harassment – is what the book is about. I probably should have told you that, but if I was good at marketing, I wouldn’t be going to prison for not selling enough books. And I am. I am going to prison for not selling enough books. And I’m going to make it a problem for all of you, but that’s for later. I Will Kill Your Imaginary Friend for $200 is about Maksim Ivanov, a broke lowlife who can see imaginary friends because he killed his own as a child. If they discover he can see them, they immediately know why, and will attack him in a berserk frenzy no matter how whimsical or harmless they seem. It’s ruined Ivan’s life and made him unemployable, so he starts taking out Craigslist ads offering to kill imaginary friends for- you get it, we’ve arrived at the title. He said the thing.

The book is also about Kay Washington, an only child, and a latchkey kid suffering from undiagnosed mental disorders. Her imaginary friend, Eddie Video, worms his way into every aspect of her life where he begins to isolate, control, and terrorize her. Ivan is the only one equipped to help, so basically they’re both royally fucked.

I bring all this up for two reasons: First, to sell you a fucking book, dipshit. Good lord, what does it take?! Second, because parts of this setup might sound familiar. All authors write from life, and my entire life for the last five years has been 1-900-HOTDOG. Eddie Video, the temperamental rascal who slowly becomes more real as he turns on his host? Directly inspired by Buster Sales.

The 1990s Blockbuster Video training mascot I wrote about for the site way back in the early days. Buster Sales is kind of a Max Headroom character. A guy stuck in a TV screen who teaches new Blockbuster employees to keep the store clean, make recommendations, and not openly whack it when that scene in Career Opportunities comes on. What made Buster Sales cursed was entirely in the execution: As the training video went on, Buster slowly transitioned from a helper to a menace, becoming more antagonistic and more able to influence the real world as his trainee made mistakes, got in trouble, and generally fell apart. It felt like the production knew it, too. Buster’s actor played him like Joe Pesci about to stab a guy in the neck, the trainee played it like Jennifer Connelly after you tell her Career Opportunities is your favorite movie, and the director framed Buster Sales in every shot like Jason Voorhees standing outside a cabin window in a thunderstorm.

I talk a lot about how horror and comedy are different sides of the same coin, and which one you end up with depends on how you flip it. Buster Sales is exactly what I mean by that: it’s funny to watch this beleaguered training video writer botch Buster’s zany antics so badly they accidentally create a minor video store demon in the process.

But take the same idea, the exact same progression, replace the bumbling employee with a lonely child and the Blockbuster Video with predatory internet culture, now you’ve got a compelling horror hook. Just like the one Buster Sales uses if you don’t upsell snacks.

Like most kids, Kay doesn’t invent her imaginary friend out of whole cloth. Children pull imaginary friends from the world around them in an attempt to make sense of their surroundings. (Side note: My favorite real example of an imaginary friend is from writer and Dogg Zzone veteran Django Wexler’s daughter.)

In my book, the real Eddie Video is a VTuber avatar from a South African children’s slop streaming collective. Try reading that sentence to your grandpa; he’ll hold you down and put your wallet in your mouth. The collective’s Twitch channel records their streams as VODs which Kay watches later on YouTube. (Sorry, stop reading this to your grandpa, he’s getting overstimulated and he’s going to bite you.) Kay likes how the interactive parts make her feel less alone, even though she’s not allowed on Twitch to watch the stream live, and only sees empty silences on the VOD as the actors wait for prompts from an audience she’s not part of. It’s a uniquely modern way to be lonely. The “show” means the world to her, but it’s really just foreign-based VTubers capitalizing on media algorithms to deliver inexplicable, dangerous nonsense. Kay never fully understands the show or what it’s doing to her brain, but she becomes enamored with it anyway.

Of course I’m really talking about Troom Troom.

I may be the world’s leading expert on Troom Troom. I’ve done hours upon hours of research simply trying to figure out one thing: What the fuck am I looking at? I, like all of their fans, have come to no satisfying answer. I only know that it’s a Ukrainian YouTube channel aimed at English-speaking children, full of bright colors, crazy voices, broken language, and tongue-eating insanity. I wrote about their weird obsession with smuggling food and ruinous crafts, both of which show up in my book. I really tried to do it justice. But Troom Troom has its own very specific madness which maps to no human brain in history, like this video about how to decorate a house if you’re a mermaid, ladybug, or dracula.

Actual line from the video, by the way. It’s all positioned to the viewer as a challenge, so the idea is that kids follow along, turn into a mermaid, and decorate a small house to spite Dracula. Try it at home! It’s easy, simply destroy your mother’s CD collection to make the perfect mermaid roof!

Sometimes the videos are timely. One of the malfunctioning flight computers that runs Troom Troom logs trending YouTube search terms in a misguided attempt to land the long-crashed plane it once belonged to, then the computer dictates content suggestions to a dying octopus so it can flail a script onto the broken Garfield keyboard that crushed it. The plane was carrying Garfield keyboards. It’s my best theory.

Here’s another video, this time to help little girls turn themselves into the robot from Squid Game – you know, the one that dictates whether or not dozens of people get murdered with machine guns. Graphically, as they scream for mercy that will never come. That robot.

How does the Troom Troom version manage to look more disturbing than the actual horror show?

The alt text on this image could be for a Babylon Bee political cartoon: “black cloaked masked figure in front of foreign flags opens door labeled SQUID GAME for young girl who has been turned into soulless murder robot.” What kid is this for, Troom Troom? How the fuck are they supposed to do any of this at home, why do you want them to do it, what are you doing, what do you get out of this, what are you doing what are you doing what are you doing-

Sorry, I was in a Troom hole.

Obviously Troom Troom had to capitalize on K-Pop Demon Hunters, just saying the title is a Snow Crash brain hack that makes parents of little girls throw money at televisions. I only watched half of it, somebody tell me if you remember the scene where meth cookie monster harasses a French housepainter with a poster of a hot cop.

Did the K-Pop boy band demon ever wind up partnering with the bird detective to make fun of Rumi’s crotch? I feel like that was foreshadowed some, but I wasn’t sure they’d ever get to it.

Troom Troom is the perfect example of something that is simultaneously hilarious and terrifying to me. When you try to comprehend it, it slips out of your brain with a homemade lubricant called Zoey K-Pop’s Ramyeon Bubblegum Fart Oil Specifically for Mind Wrestling. The true horror comes when you see the viewcount, usually in the tens of millions, and you’re forced to reflect on a future where we let all of our children’s brains be shaped by this.

I guess I’m not one to talk. 1-900-HOTDOG is its own kind of brain poison. Show one of Dennard’s articles to the average CBS viewer and they’ll have you thrown in a hotel room to be deconditioned by private detectives. And I’ve been marinating in this hot dog water for five years. That’s why my new book – which I want to reiterate has received prestigious reviews and been called a challenging meditation on how trauma and neglect shapes children into adulthood - stars the Hot Dog Crew. Your Hot Dog crew. As adorable children. Adorable children that nothing bad will happen to, certainly. They’re not minor cameos, little winks for those in the know. Without getting into spoilers, the writers of this site play a major role in my book.

Here’s Seanbaby as a little boy dreaming up a Flash Gordon-style serial where he knows devastating space karate.

Jason Pargin is an overly serious child who chooses the company of obnoxious flitting birds. It’s a metaphor for our work Slack.

Lydia Bugg is our youngest, most upbeat wiener, so she plays the role of a precocious girl lost in a children’s book she wrote herself.

Dennard Dayle with his skateboard and abs is Hot Dog’s resident cool kid, so in the book he’s an aspiring musician with an imaginary friend who’s equal parts rock star and older brother.

Merritt K knows absolutely everything about Saturday Morning Cartoons, even the ones that don’t completely kick ass.

Alex Schmidt is a brilliant kid obsessed with science, his pet rat Proton, and Beakman’s World. The only thing he wants is to find a way to combine them all.

And of course I put myself in the book. Not as a character, the whole book is kind of me. It’s about growing up the latchkey only child of a single, working parent. About raising yourself on unsupervized media, internalizing loneliness way too early, and struggling for the rest of your life to connect with other human beings in a way that seems so easy for everyone else, but you can never quite get a hold on. I wanted to connect my experiences with kids today still facing essentially the same problems, but now with countless corporations, content creators, and expertly designed algorithms all competing to milk their isolation for engagement. At its heart, I Will Kill Your Imaginary Friend for $200 is about growing up with mental illness, letting go of childhood trauma, the inherent injustice of the modern class system, and punching a racist ostrich puppet right in the fucking beak until he dies from it. And 1-900-HOTDOG is an intrinsic part of it all. I wrote it for you, and because of you.

Please buy it, read it, leave it a review wherever you do that, and tell your friends. It truly does mean a lot to me, but I’m uncomfortable with earnestness for reasons well covered by my book, so I will be returning to blackmail and harassment. Buy it or I’ll kill your cat.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Sam Koepnick, who bought seven copies of the book and it still wasn't enough. Way to go Sam, why didn't you buy eight?

You can read this article and every other one on the much better in every way 1900HOTDOG.COM