Entering so-called ‘spooky season’, there’s no better series to delve into than the creepily addictive ‘Strange’ book series by Uketsu. So far, the series consists of Strange Houses, Strange Pictures and Strange Buildings, all of which share the same addictive and puzzling storytelling. Much like the novels themselves, author and YouTuber Uketsu is somewhat of a mystery. He is known for his surrealist and unsettling short videos on YouTube and his bestselling mystery novels, all whilst keeping both his physical and personal identity hidden behind a papier-mâché mask and a voice changer.
Strange Houses
His debut mystery novel, Strange Houses, was translated from Japanese by Jim Rion last year. The bestseller focuses on a collection of abnormal and unsettling floorplans, varying from windowless rooms to a dead space between two walls. From the beginning, Uketsu draws in readers with an image of a floorplan accompanied by a paragraph including the lines “do you see anything strange about it?... a truth so terrifying, you won’t want to believe it”. The introduction is just the beginning of the reader’s interaction with the novel itself, with the images combined with the narrative creating an immersive reading experience. We are quickly introduced to the narrator’s draughtsman friend Kurihara, who assists in explaining some of the potential structural decisions for the peculiarities or identifies anything out of the ordinary. With the readable narratives, consistent illustrations and Kurihara’s input, readers cannot help but be drawn in by the somewhat far-fetched explanations for the unusualities of the floorplans.
Strange Pictures
Strange Pictures was his second novel, but was his first to be translated into English. Upon release, Strange Pictures became vastly popular and was shortlisted for both Waterstones Book of the Year 2025 and British Book Awards Fiction Book of the Year. Unlike his debut, Strange Pictures uses a series of sinister child-like drawings to assist the narrative. Whilst each drawing has its own separate harrowing story behind it, it is up to the readers to connect them all together as they read. It is arguably more chilling than his debut, with drawings tending to have quite eerie connotations since being used in various forms of horror media. The epigraph of the novel is simply the quote “all right, everyone, now I’m going to show you a picture”. Alone the quote is quite standard and unthreatening, but with the context of the novel it becomes quite disconcerting. With Uketsu’s simplistic prose combined with his stories with a lingering sense of uneasiness, it leaves the reader unsure of what to expect with every page.
Strange Buildings
His most recently translated novel in English, Strange Buildings, is a welcome combination of elements of his first two novels. It combines Strange Houses’s contribution of floorplans with Strange Pictures’s eventual link between a collection of stories. The novel focuses on eleven buildings, from a murder house to a vanishing room, all of which have very different yet very connected explanations. Strange Buildings itself is an even darker sequel to Strange Houses, with Uketsu opening with “it turns out there are far more ‘strange houses’ around Japan than I could have ever imagined”.
Whatever opinion people may have of Uketsu’s whodunnit-style mysteries, they are undoubtedly extremely unique to the genre. With the incorporated images throughout, they really demonstrate the power that illustrations can have when accompanying addictive writing. Each novel places the reader at the forefront of the examinations, with Uketsu treating each page as a piece of evidence for his readers to explore. Ultimately, he transforms the passive act of reading into a gripping, hands-on investigation.
