“In my experience, you couldn’t truly understand the secrets of a house without understanding the people living there first,” (Uketsu 19).
After the success of his last book, horror writer Uketsu has been getting inquiries from fans about their own strange buildings and if he might take a look at the floor plans to see if anything horrifying lurks in the illustrations. During his research, Uketsu finds eleven buildings that all share a terrifying history. The pieces of the puzzle are there, can you put them together?
I first read Uketsu a few years ago with Strange Pictures, which I still believe is his best work. I love when books play with their genre, especially when adding illustrations to add a layer of creepiness to the story (except for you Hidden Pictures, you’re problematic and less people should like you). Uketsu did a wonderful job of this is Strange Pictures and I enjoyed Strange Houses even if it was a bit more unbelievable than Strange Pictures. His books are entertaining and I’m always curious to see how all the pictures will link back to the mystery and horror of the story that’s unfolding.
Strange Buildings is just as enjoyable, but is very different from Uketsu’s previous works. For one thing Strange Buildings is marked as a sequel to Strange Houses which makes sense considering the subject matter, but Strange Buildings has now taken a meta tone with Uketsu being an active researched in the plot whereas the others followed fictional characters linking the pictures and plot of the story we were reading. In Strange Buildings, Uketsu tells readers that his successful investigation in Strange Houses lead to him investigating the buildings in Strange Buildings, but Uketsu was not the protagonist in Strange Houses, it was an unnamed writer. This is an easy enough thing to retcon, and I understand it, but it’s a strange tonal shift when the previous two books were focused on weird pictures and linking the individual stories surrounding them versus what now appears to be Uketsu adding himself to his own narratives. It’s fun, but a surprising shift in his writing.
This also means a change in how the story is told. While Strange Pictures didn’t have one protagonist but happened to be linked stories through illustrations, both Strange Houses and Strange Buildings are investigative, meaning that much of the dialogue is written as a script between Uketsu and his interviewee, which makes the book a fairly quick read paired with the illustrations.
I don’t want to say much so that the mystery can stay a mystery, but like his other books this was a fun quick read. I loved trying to piece together how the pictures and stories linked together and was unsurprised that I couldn’t, because honestly with Uketsu’s more recent works there’s no way of deducing them. Be prepared to have a huge suspension of disbelief when reading because some of the inferences and deductions made are so out of left field that I don’t think any detective let alone average person would be able to make that conclusion themselves, but they always end up being right. Strange Buildings even has a huge detective style monologue in the end by a character who is not a detective and I don’t know why he isn’t, because he can apparently solve anything with very little information.
Fun, quick, and surprisingly dark, Strange Buildings was a nice addition to Uketsu’s works and I like that he is having fun by adding a meta layer to his works. But I wouldn’t be sad if he returned to his roots (I still think Strange Pictures is the best!).
Publication: December 13 2023
Publisher: HarperVia
Pages: 384 pages (Hardcover)
Source: Library
Genre: Fiction, Horror, Mystery, Japanese
My Rating: ⛤⛤⛤.5
Summary:
A lonely hut in the woods.
A murder house.
A hidden chamber.
A mysterious shrine.
A home in flames.
A nightmarish prison. . . .
Each of the buildings in this book tells a chilling story. Each one is part of a puzzle. Look closely . . . and you’ll see that everything is connected. All leading to a revelation so horrifying you won’t want to believe it.
Millions have become addicted to solving Uketsu’s dark mysteries. Strange Buildings is the strangest, and darkest, of them all.
Sarah O'Connor 