What’s the book? Strange Buildings by Uketsu
How dark is it? It’s a little dark. Darker than Uketsu’s first two installments.
How good is it? 6/10 odd houses
This is the third in Uketsu’s series about strange places and mysterious events but once again, it’s not really a sequel. The author/narrator and his friend Kurihara, the true crime enthusiast, appear again but everything else stands alone.
Strange Houses, the previous installment, was quick and fun with an utterly redonkulous mystery. Strange Buildings is kind of the opposite. The mystery at its heart is less absurd and more interesting in terms of motive and emotional resonance but the pacing drags and the book repeats itself too much.
Uketsu’s books are always focused on laying out a mystery and then laying out the proposed solution step by step so I was expecting that. The previous books managed to roll along quickly and keep a sense of mild tension as the mysteries unfold but this one, much longer than the previous books, dragged on and repeated itself quite a bit. It’s as if Uketsu’s so afraid we’ll miss a brilliant connection between clues that he’s constantly reminding and recapping things. At the end, when the narrator brings all his bits of evidence to Kurihara and begins to tie them together, they spend pages and pages listing all the bits of evidence I just spent a couple hundred pages reading. It got tedious and I started skimming, which isn’t what I’m looking for at the end of a mystery.
It’s too bad the book dragged because as I mentioned before, I liked the actual mystery that unfolded. It combines family drama with cults and organized crime in surprising ways. I’ve always enjoyed Uketsu’s books as fun puzzles but this is the first time I really connected with the characters at all and felt bad for their suffering. In spite of its flaws, I have a feeling this is the mystery that will stick with me long after his first two books have faded from memory.
I know the author is famous originally for YouTube videos and his three translated novels have each been successively longer and more ambitious. Maybe what I’m seeing is the struggle to move beyond cute puzzles into something closer to a real novel with emotional depth. It wasn’t entirely successful on that score but I’m game to see what Uketsu brings us next.
