Children's Fantasy novel where the main character falls into a magical world and can turn invisible, has a talking monkey/lemur companion, fights a dragon statue, back of cover had gryphons on it, read around the year 2000

[Becky]

*SPOILERS for whatever this book is!*

I read this book when I was a kid at my old hometown's library so the year range I'm working with is probably like 1997-2002.

In this book, a school-aged boy accidentally ends up in a magical world and is given a quest by some benevolent female magic user to recover the magical artifact from the main bad guy. He befriends a small monkey-like creature that can talk (I forget the correct words they used to describe him) and the monkey creature's main character trait is that, when he's confused, he crosses his eyes. I remember him going cross-eyed a lot.

During the quest, the school boy gets attacked either by giant wasps or giant spiders and gains the ability to turn invisible because of the venom from the insect bites, but can't be fully invisible unless he removes his clothes.

Along the quest, they come across some gryphons, which don't actually have beaks, but they're close enough to the Earth version of gryphons that the boy theorizes that other people had traveled to this world before and got some details wrong when drawing them.

Eventually they get to the main bad guy's lair and there's a dragon guarding the main bad guy, but the dragon is actually a statue and the magical artifact the boy was sent to get is actually a dragon's eye. So the boy has to use his invisibility to climb up onto the dragon statue and pull out its eyes to deactivate it.

The ending of the book is that the benevolent woman wants the boy to hand her the magic dragon eyes, but the boy realizes that the woman also has a dragon statue, so he throws the eyes in a large body of water rather than let them fall in the wrong hands.

I can't remember anything about the title or the author, but I do remember the book having a different shape compared to most of the other books on the shelf and that it had some drawings of gryphons on the back.

[Becky]

Bump.

I remember the cover of the book being either yellow or orange in color?

[Nelms]

Wouldn't be The Talisman by Stephen King would it? Your description seems super familiar to me.

[Becky]

Nelms wrote: "Wouldn't be The Talisman by Stephen King would it? Your description seems super familiar to me."

Unfortunately, from what I can tell from some excerpts, it's definitely not The Talisman. Thank you for responding though!