Uketsu

A collection of linked mystery stories where each puzzle centers on a creepy included illustration. What makes it special is the meta-mystery underneath: the solutions originally given for each story turn out to be incomplete, and the larger picture only emerges when you catch what was missed. "Images deceive" could be the theme. Impressively constructed.

In Strange Pictures, Uketsu has abandoned any notion that they are writing a novel. No -- this is nothing more than content written by a content creator.

I was a sucker for this one in the shop when I flicked through it -- I love a good novel that experiments in structure and mixed media.

The incorporation of art into the story, however, makes little sense. Rather, it's padding; noise. It's the same flow chart designed by someone who's never made a flow chart repeated five or six times that show more simply states the same text the characters are repeating in overly-explanatory dialogue five or six times. It's a drawing of a blob labeled 'food' being inserted into a figure's tummy and then vanishing as the characters describe how food is digested over time. Real insightful shit.

The mystery itself is a faux-mystery strung together by deliberate withholding of clues. Those we get are advanced by characters making absurd leaps of logic, imagining the dumbest conclusion as they play at armchair psychology. Not a single use of a drawing by any character in any chapter makes any sense as it's explained hamfisted over 50 pages in the denouement. Not the psychologist's idiotic evaluation of a child's drawing; not the numbered images drawn by a supposed professional; not the boy's smudged building; not either of the landscapes drawn at death's door.

I know penny dreadfuls have existed long before the term, but -- am I just getting old here? Am I getting cranky and blinded by nostalgia? Or is there more garbage being published than ever before, and it is getting progressively harder to find the actual good novels buried under a mountain of goddamned content? show less

Strange Houses is an amazing thriller for what it evokes rather than what it demonstrates outright. In fact, even the supposed resolution serves this point. At no point are you, the reader, given the satisfaction of a cohesive answer, and by the end of it you would hate one anyway.

Uketsu's eerie diagrams and the revelations they slowly unravel into are enough by themselves - the characters, story, and everything in between are just a way guide us to our own unease without dragging us to show more each point ourselves. In this way, Strange Houses gives you the rare gift of confidence in the your own imagination and intelligence regardless of who you are and what you know. It's convinced me to read more thrillers this year for sure, only I worry they may not live up to this one. show less

I stepped into his flat. His living room, about eight tatami mats in size, was littered with books, as usual. While many were architecture-related, the vast majority were mystery novels. More than seemed reasonable, actually.

This is a strange and compelling book, apparently a bestseller in Japan. In it, a man is asked to look at the architectural layout of a house and give his opinion as to whether the young couple should buy it. It looks fine to him, but something causes him to ask his show more friend, an expert in architecture and mystery novel aficionado, to take a look, and boy, does this friend find a lot of very wacky stuff from which to extrapolate a horrifying hypothesis.

The fun of this book lies in how the layouts of the various houses are presented to the reader and then the oddities carefully pointed out and explained. It's a horror story for people who like to look at Zillow, a mystery novel for readers who are currently planning an extension. The translator, Jim Rion, mentions that the use of the floor plans creates a mystery with an easy entry point and it does allow the book to be enjoyed in a different, more participatory way than a traditionally structured thriller. I liked the novelty of it and how it made me think of floor plans in a different way (how they probably hide murderous children and murder rooms, specifically). show less