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).