There’s a lot of crossover between the horror and mystery genres. Both involve digging into a shadowy past in order to uncover some sort of tragedy or event that continues to impact the present day. This element was at its strongest during the Victorian era, which often starred paranormal detectives like Carnacki the Ghost Finder or John Silence who used logic to deduce the truth behind explicitly supernatural events. And there are plenty of mystery authors, like John Dickson Carr, who mix horror elements into mystery fiction, either through seemingly supernatural events or through dark truths or disturbing solutions that reveal human cruelty. I’ve been interested in these types of mystery/horror stories, so I was looking forward to reading this one.
After a brief intro, Strange Pictures is divided into four stories, each revolving around hand-drawn pictures. The first, “The Old Woman’s Prayer,” looks at a couple of college students and their investigation into a seemingly innocuous blog, “Oh No, Not Raku!” The blog appears to be nothing more than an artifact of an earlier period of the Internet, where personal blogs where people posted their daily routines were more common. But there’s years’ worth of deleted posts and a chilling final message:
“I am going to stop updating this blog today.
I’ve finally figured out the secret of those three drawings.
I can’t imagine the pain you must have been suffering.
Nor can I understand the depths of whatever sin you’ve committed.
I cannot forgive you. But even so, I will always love you.”
The three drawings in question were done by the blogger’s wife, Yuki, showing a baby, a woman looking at the viewer, and an old woman at prayer. The two students puzzle over the meaning before arriving at the truth. This was a solid little horror story, the exact kind of online horror that I enjoy. While the final truth isn’t something that any reader can figure out (unless they’re willing cut up the book), it’s very unsettling when the full message is revealed. We also see some of that smart mix of horror and deduction during the first conversation between our detectives, where one of them shows how some off-hand blog posts point to something concealed and retroactively horrifying. This is a very effective story.
The next, “The Smudge Room,” is my favorite story of the book. The narratives shifts to Naomi, a single mother running the rat race to try and provide for her son, Yuta. One day, she goes to pick him up at daycare when she’s shown a drawing he made for a Mother’s Day project: a picture of him and his mother outside of their apartment building…with a gray smudge over his and his mother’s apartment. This is unsettling enough, but after a close encounter with a stalker and Yuta’s disappearance from the apartment, the picture takes on a whole new meaning.
This one was very good. Uketsu weaves an unsettling mystery while dropping interesting tidbits to hook the reader. (Why does Naomi not want to contact the police?) Once again, the deductions made from the picture are really good, and a reader who’s willing to pay close attention, and to think like a child, has a chance at at least guessing the truth. To be honest, I’d say that this story isn’t fairly clued, but it is fairly foreshadowed, as all parts of the solution—both the real and the fake—are present in the narrative before the reveal. The result is an oddly heartwarming story…before a sudden act of violence reminds us that there’s more going on here.
“The Art Teacher’s Final Drawing” is the most mystery-focused—with alibis, timelines and everything—and yet my least favorite of the narratives here. The story revolves around art teacher Yoshiharu Mirua, who’s found brutally beaten to death at the final rest station on a mountain. Not only did the killer savage him with a viciousness that could only come from pure hatred, but they also stole some of his camping equipment. The final bizarre aspect of the case is a crude drawing of the mountain view, unbefitting a skilled artist. The police fail to solve the crime, so a young man who Miura helped sets out to solve the crime himself.
As I said, this is the most mystery-focused of the stories, and Uketsu does his part to make this as painless as possible for the reader, with multiple illustrations of key points and timelines of the crime. They crowd out the text, but they do their job of making the crime easy to follow. The main trick the killer uses is brilliant and really fits the horror tone of the rest of the work. The final sequence is genuinely chilling as we see how deep a mess our protagonist has found himself in. But the main draw of the story, the picture, doesn’t work for me. The initial deductions the protagonist makes about the picture are smart and well-observed. But the final reveal…look, at the end of this story, we have two dying messages, and both hinge on the police making very specific leaps of logic, both are created by people who are suffering from a brutal and violent attack. I didn’t buy them at all.
The final story wraps up the narrative, filling in missing details and revealing the doomed and corrosive love at the heart of this book. Some of the reveals are quite good, some feel like one twist too many. And yet, I liked this book. I picked it up wanting a horror/mystery mix and got exactly what I asked for. Uketsu expertly blends the disturbing subject matter with the mystery content, using the investigation to lead us, hand-in-hand, to the truth…letting go when the reality of what’s happened hits us.
I can think of no better complement to pay to author and translator alike than to say I intend to check out Strange Houses in the future. Recommended.
Other Reviews: The Library at Borley Rectory, Beneath the Stains of Time, Puzzles, Riddles, and Murders, Stephen M. Pierce, Pretty Sinister Books, The Invisible Event (contains minor spoilers).
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