My Favorite Band Does Not Exist

My Favorite Band Does Not Exist is a young adult Urban Fantasy novel by Robert T. Jeschonek. It tells the story of a teenage runaway named Idea Deity who is convinced that he's a character in a novel and that he will die in the 64th chapter. To pass the time, he has created a fake band called Youforia, complete with a fake website, and fake blog. The phony band gets a lot of buzz and people start spreading rumors about having seen concerts that Idea knows for a fact never happened.

The story also has a second protagonist, Reacher Mirage, lead singer of the secret rock band Youforia. Reacher suffers from crippling Performance Anxiety and as such is unable to perform in public. All of his concerts are performed with a curtain in front of the band. Reacher knows nothing of Idea's existence and has absolutely no clue who is leaking what he thought was secret information to the public.

Much of the story focuses on the collision between the lives of these two characters, driven by Idea's effort to find who is "stealing" his creation and Reacher's effort to find the person leaking information about his band to the public. As one might expect, things start to get strange when the two of them meet.

Tropes used in this novel include:

• Arc Number: Sixty-four. Idea believes that he will die in the sixty-fourth chapter of the novel he's in and "Chapter 64" is the name of one of Youforia's songs.
• Awesome McCoolname: Idea Deity, Reacher Mirage, and Johnny Fireskull.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Idea does a very literal version of this when he breaks through the fourth wall and finds himself in a room with a computer, on which a novel entitled "My Favorite Band Does Not Exist" is being written. The novel has been completed right up until the scene where he is standing in that room and any change he makes to the written document becomes real.
• Cassandra Truth: No one believes Idea when he comes out and admits that Youforia is fake. Though the definiton of "truth" here has to be stretched a little, since, unbeknownst to Idea, Youforia actually exists.
• Fake Band: Idea creates one called Youforia, only to discover that they actually exist.
• Genre Savvy: Idea has a very specific variant of Genre Savviness in that he has somehow become aware of the fact that he is a character in a novel.
• Literal Split Personality: Idea and Reacher. They were originally one person occupying one reality, until the Big Bad turned it into two realities, hoping that he would be able to hold power by controlling both. Idea's fake band page and Reacher's Rock Opera were actually their subconscious efforts to reach out to each other.
• Love Interest: Enuince for Idea and Eurydice for Reacher. They're actually two halves of the same whole and are the only other people besides the Big Bad to be aware of the split in reality. Later they merge into Johnny Fireskull's girlfriend.
• Mind Screw: To call this book "surreal" wouldn't even begin to describe it. Don't worry though; it'll all make some sense when you finish it.
• Prophecy Twist: Idea spends the whole story predicting that he will die in Chapter 64, and in a way, he does. When he merges with Reacher, the person known as Idea Deity stops being alive.
• Portal Book: Both Reacher and Idea are obssessed with a novel called Fireskull's Revenant and later enter it. It turns out, the purpose of the book was to serve as a means for them to combine their personalities back into one.
• Rock Opera: Reacher writes one about a character named Impulse Devilcare who believes he is trapped in a novel and will die in Chapter Sixty-Four.
• The Runaway: Idea
• Split Personality Merge: This happens to Idea and Reacher at the end. They cease to be individuals and become a rockstar named Johnny Fireskull. (The name is dervied from Johnny Without and Fireskull, their counterparts in Fireskull's Revenant.)
• Story Within a Story: Fireskull's Revenant, but it's also a lot more than that.
• This Is Reality: Idea's belief that he is trapped in a novel is treated as a psychological disorder called Deity Syndrome.