Strange Buildings (2023/2026) by Uketsu (translated by Jim Rion)

I didn’t plan to review this book so soon after it’s prequel, but my library gave me both when I checked Strange Houses out.

As it’s Japanese title, Hen na le 2, implies, Strange Buildings is a sequel to Strange Houses. The publication of the latter book has resulted in a flood of people contacting Uketsu to tell him about their own weird houses. Most of these don’t have an explanation (“I couldn’t bring those stories to an end.”), but there are some that do have answers…and connections. Strange Buildings collects eleven “files” that turn out to have far-reaching links.

I won’t talk about each file in detail; there are other reviews for that. Instead, I must give Uketsu credit for changing things up for this book. Houses used the same basic set up for each of it’s stories. Buildings mixes it up. There’s the conventional floorplan/interview format where the author has to examine houses with weird bits, like a dead end hallway, but there’s also the journal of a young boy subject to horrifying abuse, an exposé on a cult, a historical account of a mill house in the woods. There’s a little more variety to the mysteries as well. Two of the files are linked accounts of a fatal house fire. In another, a man finds that his house is listed on an app for “Incident Properties” “places where bad things have happened,” but his house was built after the date on the app. Most of the files follow the script format of Houses, but the variety in the storytelling gives the book some more life.

Strange Buildings is stronger as both a mystery and a horror novel than its predecessor. On the mystery side, it’s very well-clued. Most of the files have the author presenting an explanation or answering some kind of question, but there’s usually some hanging detail that he can’t explain. The last chapter has best bro Kurihara examine the files himself and connect all this mystery and bloodshed. And it’s good! Just about every twist has some sort of cluing or foreshadowing. The summation even has exact quotes from earlier in the book! I know that some people don’t like Uketsu’s illustration/recap heavy style, and I don’t disagree, but it works really well here and keeps everything clear. There’s even cluing for the big connection between the files, even if it does require some abstract thinking. The connection is weird and creative and hilarious and deeply cynical and kinda gross all at once. Some of it doesn’t work for me (ROT13: fheryl fbzr bs gubfr ubhfrf qba’g ybbx gung zhpu yvxr gur Ubyl Zbgure?), but for the most part I was willing to buy into it. I also had a problem with some of the smaller mysteries, (ROT13: Va Svyr 1, V sryg gung gur rkcynangvba sbe Lnlbv’f zbgure’f orunivbe qvqa’g jbex jryy. Fheryl n orggre rkcynangvba jbhyq or ure srne gung ure “puvyq bs fva” jbhyq or chavfurq, rfcrpvnyyl fvapr n xvq npghnyyl qvq qvr bhgfvqr ure ubhfr? Gur oybbq glcr vqrn sryg gbb qvfpbaarpgrq.) And in File 5 (qb jr rire yrnea jub chg gur ubhfr ba Vapvqrag Ncc naq jul?) Finally, the structure of the book means that the mastermind behind all this bloodshed gets less page time than a bit character. I accept it as a necessity of the culture, but it’s worth noting. And why was chapter 4 written in present tense?

And the horror aspects are better. Much “better.” I didn’t find Houses all that scary, but this book goes to some genuinely dark places. While there’s nothing graphic on-page, Uketsu pulls no punches. It fits with the cynical tone of the book. Just about every relationship or seemingly good deed is exposed as a sham, with something much darker behind it. It gets kinda comical, especially at the end, where Ukestu gives you a plot twist, then subverts it a page later just to set up the bleak ending. I didn’t feel that any of this was sleazy or overly exploitative, but I could see some readers finding the content distasteful.

In the end, I still enjoy Strange Pictures the best out of Uketsu’s work. It’s the best as a novel. But I can’t deny that Strange Buildings addresses every issue I had with Houses and is a massive improvement. If you completely bounced off Houses I don’t think this will make you a fan, but if you thought that Houses was good but flawed, or just thought the concept was neat, Strange Buildings is very much worth your time. If you’re a fan of mystery and horror in general, you should check it out. Recommended. 

Other Reviews: Stephen M. Pierce, Beneath the Stains of Time, The Library at Borley Rectory, A Weekly Dose of Architectural Books, Fang's Mystery Blog.

Driysham 2 (2022) written and directed by Jeethu Joseph

Earlier this year, I reviewed the Malayali movie Drishyam (Visual) and really enjoyed it. It was a solid crime drama about a father trying to help his family after his eldest daughter accidentally killed a rapist. And the central alibi could have pulled right out the Golden Age. So it was with some interest that some friends and I sat down to watch Drishyam 2.

The movie takes place seven years after the events of the previous one. Georgekutty and his family are doing pretty well, all things considered. Georgekutty is now the owner of a movie theater where he gets to show off his favorite movies and is even working on a film of his own (though the production is going quite slow, to his wife’s frustration.) The family now lives in a nicer house. Georgekutty even has fancy CCTV at the theater and his old TV repair shop. Youngest daughter Anu is in her rebellious teenager phase, but she’s making friends at her school. There’s even hope of marrying off Anju, the eldest. Yes, life is looking very good for Georgekutty.

But there are shadows darkening the family’s lives. Anju suffers from nightmares and seizures from the trauma of Varun’s murder. Anu’s love interest has an unhealthy interest in the murder. Georgekutty’s newfound success breeds resentment among his neighbors, who are now more willing to believe that his family was involved in Varun’s murder, and it’s affecting his daughter’s marriage prospects. And the police haven’t given up trying to nail the family.

And unbeknownst to anyone, Georgekutty was seen that fateful night. The witness was arrested that same night and doesn’t quite realize the implications of what he saw, but he’s a desperate man, and there’s a reward offered for any information on Varun’s body…

After finishing the movie, my first thought was that I didn’t like it as much as the first one. But that’s a little unfair. Drishyam 2 is better paced than its predecessor. It’s still about an hour before the plot really kicks off, but there’s more intrigue since we know about the Sword of Damocles over the family’s head. And the midpoint has a really good twist that recontextualizes what we’ve seen so far.

My main issue was with the structure of the film, which really isn’t its fault. The original Driysham had a really fascinating cat-and-mouse game and central problem (How did Georgekitty fake an alibi?) Here, the tension comes from Georgekutty being oblivious to the tightening net around him, meaning we’re tapping our fingers waiting for it all to explode. This means, however, that the counterplays are all confined to the last half-hour of the movie. They are foreshadowed, but, like the first film, not in a way where you can watch and predict what the endgame will be.

And don’t get me wrong, the endgame is great. But it lacks the sheer impact of the first movie. To be as vague as possible about both: In the first film, Georgekutty beats the police in part because he’s able to manipulate them into destroying their own case. He knows how they think and act and exploits that. When he wins, it feels like well-deserved karma. Here, his plan boils down to "lie,” with his machinations meant to make that lie plausible. And they are good machinations, but because we’re not given the same insight into what he’s doing, they lack some oomph. It just felt implausible to me that he was able to get the police off his back with this plan, even if one of the main ideas is really clever. Maybe it would have helped if, after we get the evidence that “proves” his family is innocent, we were given a few minutes to see the aftermath and wonder how he managed to pull it off, but instead we get the moment and the explanation right after that.

Really, I’m just complaining that nothing can beat the final shot of the previous film.

There are also a couple of loose ends. The bit with Anu’s boyfriend being interested in the murder goes nowhere. The resentment towards Georgekutty from his neighbors also doesn’t impact anything, which is a missed opportunity in my view. Georgekutty’s plan in the previous film hinged on public sympathy, and it would have been interesting to see him try and account for a lack of it this time around.

But again, most of this is just me disappointed that I didn’t get the movie I wanted to watch. In the end, I have to give Jeethu Joseph credit for making a sequel that really does feel like a plausible outcome of first film. If you liked Drishyam and want to see Georgekutty win again, this is a solid sequel. Just keep in mind that this is a different film. Recommended.

Three Card Murder (2023) by J. L. Blackhurst

Back in 2023, the Puzzle Doctor reviewed Three Card Murder, a new book by J. L. Blackhurst. That's actually the pen name of Jenny Blackhurst, a writer of psychological thrillers. Three Card Murder, by contrast, was a colorful reference to the Golden Age of mystery fiction, complete with three(!) locked rooms. It sounded promising. But it wasn’t until the Honkaku Discord server chose it as a book club book that I finally got around to reading it.

Three Card Murder stars Tess Fox, a newly-appointed Detective Inspector looking to cut her teeth on a murder case. The murder is that of Shaun Mitchell, who crashed to the ground outside of his apartment building. He’s partly been bound with rope and his throat slit. But when Tess and her team enter his filthy apartment, they quickly realize they have a problem: The CCTV camera outside shows no one entering his apartment for a day before his death, and the door was boarded up from the inside. Tess isn’t looking forward to trying to chase down an invisible, intangible man, and she has enemies on the force who would love to use this as an excuse to one-up her. But she has bigger problems.

Tess is the daughter of Frank Jacobs, the biggest conman in Brighton, head of an organization of swindlers. Tess didn’t know her father growing up and tracked him down fifteen years ago. She was accepted with open arms but abruptly joined the police force six months later. The reason is only partly down to moral qualms. Tess’s half-sister, Sarah, made a foolish effort to con three men out of their ill-gotten gains and it went badly wrong. Tess ended up killing one of them to bail her and Sarah out. Shaun Mitchell was one of those men, and Tess has good reason to think that someone is trying to tie her half-sister, or even Tess herself, to his murder. So she, with great reluctance, asks Sarah for her help.

Shaun Mitchell isn’t the only locked room mystery our cop and con sisters will have to contend with though. Another man is found stabbed to death in a lift, even though no one was seen to approach him. Another victim is shot to death in a hotel room chained shut and that CCTV shows no one entering. There’s a nice sense of forward momentum to the book. The other members of the book club griped a bit about the writing, but I didn’t mind it too much. There are, perhaps, some chapters that are mostly filler, such as one where Sarah impersonates a psychic, but for the most part I found this to be a solid read on a writing level. The only thing I didn’t like was the book constantly reminding us that Tess killed a man. Yes, it’s important because concealing that and her connection to the Jacobs’ motivates some of Tess’s actions, but I didn’t need reminding of it.

The book falls apart for me at the ending. Take the locked rooms: They aren’t bad. You could argue that the first one makes use of a hackneyed plot device, but I’d say that the way Blackhurst uses it here is silly but plausible. The third locked room is pretty great, my favorite of the book. But there’s almost no cluing. This is especially egregious for the second death. We’re told that X was acting a certain way, but if you flip back, you’ll see that that detail is never mentioned. And it could have been a good clue! And, frankly, the police should have been able to solve it, they would have noticed that fact at some point. It would have been fine if that was the point, like, "they're going to figure this out but I just want to confuse them for a while,) but no, they just don’t notice it. The same goes for the culprit. They’re straight out of a thriller, no chance at figuring out who they are and what they want except through genre savvy and wild guessing. The worst bit is the ending. I can buy Sarah making the choice that she does at the end, I can’t believe that Tess would go through with it.

So, in the end, I was disappointed with Three Card Murder. It’s not an awful book, but it doesn’t live up to the promise of three impossible crimes with a backdrop of con artistry. I can’t in good conscience say you should check it out. Not Recommended.

Other Reviews: In Search of the Classic Mystery Novel,  Crossexaminingcrime, Beneath the Stains of Time, Fang's Mystery Blog.

A Game of Turnabouts (2019) by Gizmological

In light of just how popular the Ace Attorney series is, it should come as no surprise that there’s plenty of fan content out there. Fan art, fanfiction…and even fan cases. Programs like PyWright and Ace Attorney Online allow dedicated fans to make their own AA cases, ranging from straightforward pastiche to original fiction in the AA engine. One of these dedicated fans is Gizmological. While most well-known AA fan case makers tend to make cases that are either difficult, dark, or dark and difficult, most of Gizmo’s tend to be a little more conventional, including his own AA fan campaign, Beyond the Shadows. A Game of Turnabouts is his most recent fan case.

Set after Spirit of Justice, Game sees Phoenix and Athena invited to the home of millionaire Arkus Strater. Strater is hosting a party, though the guest list is pretty small: Phoenix and Athena, Strater’s business partner Paul Barre, said partner’s wife, Grace (née Gilding) employee Conner Irving, and Strater’s daughter’s boyfriend Ken Forza. Strater announces that they’re going to play a murder mystery game. “No need to be alarmed. Nobody here is going to die.” The guests are all given roles with certain objectives to complete before the end of the night. All harmless-sounding fun, but the guests seem very, very nervous about this. And the game is based off a real unsolved murder from three years ago that took place with this same group of people.

One guess who’s found stabbed to death upstairs at the end of the game.

Unfortunately for Phoenix, he’s the only one upstairs at the time of the murder, and so Athena has to defend him from (literal) rockstar prosecutor Klavier Gavin. (“Don’t worry boss, I won’t lose this case, no matter how dreamy the prosecution is!”) But don’t get hasty, this isn’t a lost gem of an impossible crime. The explanation is obvious and no effort is made to disguise it. The trial doesn’t revolve around, “How was this crime committed?” but instead around, “Who could have used this method?” And the mystery overall is pretty solid. The contradictions are pretty good, though most are pretty easy. The exception is one near the beginning of the trial. This is the third(!) time I’ve played this and it tripped me up twice. But the later ones are better; very subtle and tricky. Gizmological has a real knack for re-using the evidence in unexpected ways, or taking evidence that you think is just to set up the background and making it part of the mystery. There’s a clever and understated twist with the rules for the game that I especially liked.

The characters are all pretty memorable, though I wish we’d seen more of some of them during the investigation portion. I really liked what this case did with the killer. They’re not sympathetic in the Conan or Kindaichi sense, where they’re avenging some lost family member, but just someone stuck in a bad position who lashes out, with fatal consequences. Their portrayal—combined with a final twist about one of the characters—gives the case a somber tone without plunging into full darkness.

All in all, this is similar to Turnabout Idol, in that it’s a fun Ace Attorney pastiche that tries to emulate playing the original games. And it succeeds! It’s a good, solid mystery. And while you will obviously get much more out of it if you’ve played the games, you can even enjoy it without that (since the spoilers for the main games are very light until the post-credits). Recommended. I plan to look at more fan cases in the future.

You can play the case here.

Turnabout Idol (2016) by Mie Takase (translated by thewrightstuff)

Image taken from The Case Files of Ho-Ling

Considering how big the Ace Attorney series is, it might come as a shock to people that there aren’t a lot of tie-in novels. I mean, it’s a surprise to me. You’d think that it would be catnip. I guess that’s what the manga stories are for.

But, as Ho-Ling has noted in some of his posts on the series, the format of the games doesn’t really translate well to “traditional” mystery fiction. Ace Attorney is more about adjusting to new information. Series protagonist Phoenix Wright is no Perry Mason. He often goes into court with no idea about what happened or who’s responsible, and even when he does know the latter, there are always unanswered questions he has to figure out in court. So while the series is fair-play, and while it does foreshadow and clue some of its twists, the nitty-gritty is worked out in real-time. You can argue that the series’ focus on exposing contradictions, getting new testimony, exposing the contradictions that come from that, etc., means that you’re solving the mystery in real-time. But my point is that it’s deceptively tricky to make that formula into a book, or to translate a mystery into that format.

But that didn’t stop author Mie Takase from giving it a shot. Takase has written a handful of horror novels (Ho-Ling reviewed one here), but she’s also done a lot of tie-in novels for other video game franchises, from Persona to Kirby. Turnabout Idol was the first of her two books for the Ace Attorney series.

The book opens with Phoenix, along with his assistants, Apollo Justice and Anthea Cykes, arriving at the Pegasus Town mall to support Phoenix’s adoptive daughter Trucy, a magician. Trucy is sharing the stage with two others: idol singer Melody Cutter, who cuts up fruit with a giant knife during her songs, and Wade Ukulfaskul, a painfully unfunny comedian. After Wade crashes and bombs, Melody takes the stage, but it’s clear that her heart’s not in it, not to mention that she’s missing her knife. Phoenix goes to talk to mall’s owner about another job for Trucy, when he’s interrupted by the news: Wade’s been stabbed to death! And guess whose knife did the deed, and who is now in desperate need of a lawyer. Not that she’s very forthcoming about some very important information…

Takase made a real effort to translate game mechanics into book form. It’s not obvious unless you’ve played them, but there were multiple points where I saw gameplay moments like identifying locations on a map or the “Thought Route” seamlessly transferred into a conventional narrative. The characters feel like Ace Attorney characters too, quirky and memorable with funny dialogue. The case against Melody looks bleak, but Phoenix points out some minor flaws in the witnesses' testimonies that stack up to show that they’re lying. I think that some of the series staples like the witnesses having over-dramatic reactions to their lies being pointed out didn’t carry over well, but that’s a minor point.

But nevermind the fannish stuff, how’s the mystery? That’s pretty good too! You have to keep in mind that this was aimed at a younger audience, but with that caveat in mind, the mystery holds up. I suspect that most readers will figure out who the killer is, and maybe even have a pretty good idea of what they did after the crime, but the fun is seeing Phoenix prove that. The final confrontation has a lot of great back-and-forth as Phoenix almost corners the killer, but they come up with a lie to get out of it, but that creates another mistake that Phoenix can push back on, etc., until he finally catches them in a lie they can’t weasel out of. There’s a minor locked room mystery here, as the crime takes place in a room where one entrance is locked and another is under observation, but it’s a pretty small part of the story with a simple solution.

The main weakness is the motive. Not the motive for the murder—that’s fine. If I told you what it was it would sound stupid, but in context it’s actually kind of sad. No, the weakness is in why the killer frames Melody. We’re even told at the end that it was“Undue resentment due to a misunderstanding.” I think that this motive had an interesting core to it that could have been explored, but this book didn’t do that. But that’s the only flaw.

I must also give a shout-out to the translation by “thewrightstuff.” As long-time fans know, the AA series isn’t just a translation, it’s a localization, where the translators change the names and context to set the work in the country of the translation. And while this translator does provide a copy of the book with the original Japanese names, they also have a very good localization. “Melody Cutter.” That’s inspired.

So yeah, this was great. Turnabout Idol is a fun junior mystery novel. Fans of the series should absolutely check it out, but even someone who’s never played the games would enjoy this. Recommended.

The book can be found here.

Other Reviews: The Case Files of Ho-Ling, Bad Player's Good Reviews.

The Lapis Lazuli Castle Murders (2002/2024) by Takekuni Kitayama (translated by Mitsuda Konno and cosmiicnana)

I suspect that most readers of this blog probably don’t know the name Takekuni Kitayama. Unless, that is, you play the Danganronpa series of games. Kitayama got his start writing novels in 1991 but didn’t really become prominent until his prequel Danganronpa Kirigiri novels. He would also work on New Danganronpa V3. But his start were the Castle books, a series of books that are connected not by recurring characters or a central detective, but by the recurring motif of seven cursed daggers, six headless knights, of fantastical settings. And, of course, by locked rooms.

And decapitations. Lots of decapitations.

Our chances of getting translations of his non-Danganronpa work were slim, but thankfully Mitsuda Konno and cosmiicnana stepped in to translate The “Lapis Lazuli Castle” Murders. Well, technically it’s human-edited MTL, but my understanding is that nana actually did contribute to the translation, and we’re going to focus on the “human-edited” part. I’d heard wonderful things about this book across the blogosphere, but would it hold up?

Japan, 1989. Kimiyo is a young woman who is a regular patron at a certain library, one so removed from civilization that it’s known as “The Library at the End of the World.” One day, a young man, Kito comes in and says, “Hey babe, you and me, we’re connected, reincarnations of a knight and his lady, doomed to kill each other with cursed daggers over and over again in an endless, brutal cycle, from which we cannot escape. There is no hope.”

Kito is very bad at pickup lines.

Kimiyo wants to dismiss it, but it is a very weird thing to lie about. And the library does have a weird dagger in the storeroom. And there are odd legends attached to it…

1243, France. Marie is the only daughter of Count Geoffrey, a brooding and possibly unstable lord who’s cooped up in the Lapis Lazuli Castle (“because of the bluish stones that made up the outer walls”). Marie has a cogent of knights at her disposal, led by the dashing Raine. Marie fears her father, suspecting that he had something to do with the disappearance of her mother. Marie saw the two of them enter a room, but when she entered, they had vanished. And then she saw footprints appear on the floor, one by one, heading into the wall. Raine is able to explain this but becomes the victim of a mystery himself. One night, Marie finds his helmet lying outside her bedroom. Come morning, the knights have all disappeared from the castle, seemingly slipping past the guards and leaving no footprints in the mud outside. They are found up a nearby river, their heads hacked off. What’s even weirder is that it would take a day’s journey to get to where their bodies were found, but all six knights were seen alive twelve hours before…

1916, Verdun. Jean is a French solider suffering through the horrors of trench warfare. Marie is now a nurse, and the two of them are looking for a way to break the endless cycle. Jean has other issues as well. He sees a German solider approaching, but when he gets close, Jean sees that he’s missing his head. One of his comrades reports another soldier’s head vanishing in an instant. He finds four bodies with their heads hacked off in a bunker, but they vanish in the seconds he takes his eyes off them.

And jumping between these periods is the nonbinary detective Snowy, someone who walks around “looking for chaos” to restore order. Luckily, there’s a lot of chaos to go around.

So, there’s a lot going on here. In spite of the long summary, the different periods are pretty well-segregated, keeping what could easily have been a sprawling mess under control. This is one of those books that’s all about the mystery. The back-and-forth between the characters is lively enough, but in the end, you’re reading this for the tricks.

They are, for the most part, good. I thought the WWI segment was the weakest in this regard. The explanation for the decapitations is okay, but the vanishing bodies are an anticlimax. Even Jean gripes about how the explanation doesn’t really help him out, "The answer gave me nothing.” The 1243 segment is pretty solid. The diagrams make it pretty clear what happened, I think, though it requires some specific knowledge to explain everything about the crimes. I love those diagrams though. And they’re very useful with the third set of murders in this book.

About two-thirds through, the Library at the End of the World becomes the stage for a brutal triple murder in a locked room that leaves two employees decapitated and another lying stabbed on the floor. Oddly, this one is solved pretty quickly after it happens, which is a shame because it’s the best one in the book. If I were to state the solution as bluntly as possible, it would sound stupid, but Kitayama makes it work. He’s helped in this by the diagrams, which make a confusing crime scene very clear. I looked at one and thought, “Hey, why is X like that?” and lo and behold, that was a clue. Even better is that there’s a very good reason—a very twisted reason—why the killer goes to so much effort to do it this way. I also like how Kitayama paces the explanations. He doesn’t just dump them all at the end but explains them at different points. (And Snowy isn’t the only one who gets the honors of summation.) Answering some of the mysteries keeps the book moving forward and prevents the climax from getting bogged down in explanations at the end, right when our heroes are facing the firing squad.

I do have a few issues. Like I said, this is not a book for those of you who want in-depth characterization or lyrical writing. The other major issue I had is with how reincarnation is handled. It’s hard to explain without spoilers, but I’ll try: If I were to tell you that a story revolves around reincarnation, you’d probably think that there are certain rules it operates under. I’m thinking of two in particular. Neither of them apply here. One of these twists is admittedly foreshadowed by dialogue earlier in the novel. The other twist came out of nowhere for me. I don’t know if reincarnation has other common themes in Japanese culture that would ground this twist better, but it really threw me at first. In fairness, I got over it, and Kitayama uses this violation in interesting ways, such as how it ties into the killer’s motive for all this bloodshed. And I liked how Snowy’s time jumping wasn’t just a fun gimmick but actually plays a role in the climax. For all my griping, Kitayama works the fantastical elements into the book instead of just using them as set dressing or as jumping off points for the rest of the story.

And the final map is a nice touch.

I can’t hate anything that swings for the fences like this. What we have here is a story with some eye-catching premises but with solid mysteries backing them. This is a roller coaster ride of a book, with ideas fired off left and right. There are a couple of duds, but the best land with the force of a mortar. Absolutely worth reading for locked room fans, or those who want to see some imagination in their crime fiction. Recommended.

The book can be read here. 

Other Reviews: The Case Files of Ho-Ling, Beneath the Stains of Time, To Solve a Mystery (under February), Puzzles, Riddles, and Murders, Fang's Mystery Blog (Chinese).

Strange Houses (2021/2025) by Uketsu (translated by Jim Rion)

I enjoyed horror author Uketsu’s Strange Pictures when I read it last year. Thankfully for all the Uketsu fans, 2025 saw the English release of his first novel, Strange Houses, but I was a little uncertain. I’d heard that this book wasn’t as good as his second one. I’d also watched the YouTube video (make sure to turn off the auto-dub) that he later turned into Strange Houses, and while it had some interesting points, I didn’t find it all that scary. But, as the title of this post shows, I gave the book a shot anyway.

The book opens with the author/narrator, a freelance writer specializing in stories of the macabre, receiving a request from a friend. This friend is looking for a house for him and his wife, and he’s found a promising one. But there’s a weird anomaly in the floor plan: a space in the kitchen that’s completely walled-off and serves no purpose. Intrigued, the narrator brings the floor plans to his friend, Kirihara, “a draughtsman with a prestigious architectural firm.” Kirihara is fascinated, but he soon finds more oddities than just that odd space. There’s one more bed than there should be, there’s a window peeping into one of the bedrooms, and there’s one more glaring issue, one that gets him to thinking about something truly evil going on in that house…

…And that revelation comes totally out of nowhere. It’s ludicrous. It’s a massive leap based on what we know, but Kirihara is of course 100% right. The rest of the book expands on the central plot of the video. The narrator posts about the house online, looking for more information, and is contacted by a woman whose husband vanished after visiting another odd house. Again, Kirihara and the narrator go to work prying open the house’s dark secrets. After that, the two of them are shown one more floor plan, this one based off the memories of a house their client visited in childhood. What should have been a peaceful visit ended when a young boy turned up dead. The official story is that he fell from an altar, but Kirihara again draws darker conclusions.

When the book is focusing on the author and Kirihara looking over floor plans and making deductions, it’s great. A lot of the anomalies in the plans don’t require architectural knowledge, just thinking about how a room fits into the wider design of a house, or what a room would look like if you opened a window into it. The third story is honestly a good murder mystery in and of itself. And I like how Uketsu takes the basic idea behind the first floor plan and mixes it up for the other two. This book is pretty short, but I could have read a book twice its size just going over floor plans. The problem is the book’s overarching plot. Almost everything about it is ridiculous and the root of Kirihara’s wilder conclusions. The first and third stories end with him uttering something completely off the wall that’s barely, if at all, supported by what we’ve learned. Ho-Ling compares the first chapter to an urban legend where you don't need to have a 100% airtight explanation; in fact the irrationality is part of the appeal. But when Uketsu tried to expand and rationalize it, the wheels started coming off.

The problems with the book’s plot come to the fore in the final chapter, where the author and another character finally get some answers about what’s going on…in the form of an exposition dump. One long chapter of exposition. The thing is, the backstory is genuinely interesting and messed up! Feuding families! Sinister plots! Curses! Insane rituals! Delusions that wreck havoc on real people! It’s all so juicy, but it gets poured on you all at once. There needed to be one more chapter to pace these revelations out a bit or at least devote half of the final chapter to one more floor plan that could have let us deduce at least part of this. The book ends on a note of unsettling ambiguity, but the impact is lessened because it’s about people we’ve never met!

It’s frustrating, because the individual mysteries are quite good and worth reading, and I like the central concept for the horror, especially in the first story. (ROT13: Rirel ubhfr unf oyvaq fcbgf, naq guvf gnxrf vg gb gur rkgerzr jvgu jung’f nyzbfg n ubhfr-jvguva-n-ubhfr, haorxabjafg gb gur bhgfvqr jbeyq.) But I can’t really justify plopping down full price for Strange Houses in light of its issues. If you’re still interested, check out the linked video above, which would later become the first story of this book. If that intrigues you, try looking this up at your local library. If not, then this is Not Recommended.

I’m still gonna read Strange Buildings. Remember how I said I’d read a book twice this one’s length that’s all about floor plans? Buildings sounds like that.

Other Reviews: The Case Files of Ho-Ling, Stephen M. Pierce, Beneath the Stains of Time, Pretty Sinister Books (contains some spoilers, not much more than my own).