Mini-Review: Strange Buildings

Look, I couldn’t help myself. I know I said last time that I was done with Uketsu’s ARG-esque horror-tinged mystery novels, but a book called Strange Buildings just calls to me. Strange buildings of all kinds are part of my DNA. I have strange building fever, and the only cure is more strange buildings. Whenever I’m not looking at a strange building, I’m constantly thinking “Where are the strange buildings?”

Once again the book is narrated by a fictionalised version of Uketsu himself, who during his research for Strange Houses was contacted by a large number of people who had their own strange house stories to tell, and decided to look into them on the side in the hope that he could resolve some of his readers’ unanswered questions. Eleven of those mysteries ended up seemingly being connected by a common thread involving a shady construction company with ties to a secretive religious sect; the book we’re presented with consists of these eleven stories and is topped off by Uketsu and his architect buddy Kurihara trying to put the pieces together.

In my review of Strange Houses I said that the “mysterious floorplan” format worked a lot better for a black and white novel than the “mysterious picture” format of Strange Pictures. It seems like Uketsu might agree with me, since he not only continued it into this book but also has his author avatar state at one point that unravelling architectural drawings is becoming his life’s work. If that indicates an intention to keep ploughing this furrow in subsequent books, I’m all for the idea.

Last time, I ended up concluding that Strange Houses was pushing against the constraints of its medium, on the basis that it felt too much like reading about people solving an ARG instead of reading an actual story. Well, it seems Uketsu and I were on the same page about that as well: Strange Buildings is much more novelistic in its approach, often using the floorplans merely as a springboard or an accompaniment to the narration and dialogue, which is where the meat of both the mystery-solving and the storytelling takes place. This largely eliminates the “watching someone solve an ARG” problem I had with the previous two books, as the stories told by Strange Buildings feel much more suitable for a novel.

Relying on prose and dialogue does mean that the prose and dialogue have to carry more weight, which potentially sails into a different pitfall. I didn’t really go into it in my last post because the reliance on the images and the puzzle-solving largely rendered it irrelevant, but Uketsu’s first two books are written in an extremely basic style: sparse non-fiction-esque prose, as little scenery description as the book can get away with, dialogue rendered in script-style format. That’s not inherently a bad thing—the book is presented as an author’s account of a true investigation, so it makes sense it would be written like one—but it was pared with clunky, leaden narration and dialogue where characters often sounded identically flat. Obviously, this could become an issue for Strange Buildings if it’s leaning more on the writing to convey its story.

Happily, the experience from writing the previous two books seems to have paid off for the real-life Uketsu, as the narration flows a lot better here and the different interview subjects have more distinctive voices. During moments when the book has to describe something intricate, like the mechanism of a hidden door, it has much less of a tendency to fall into the breathless “and then this thing connects to that thing and then when you press this button the hatch here opens up and then…” rhythm than the last book did, although it comes close at times. All of this means that not only are the words on the page given more importance, reading them is a far smoother and more enjoyable experience.

While the final chapter avoids the massive infodump that largely soured Strange Houses for me, it still involves a long sequence of Uketsu and his architect friend solving all of the story’s mysteries (or at least giving their best guesses regarding the mysteries, not all of which are necessarily correct). It is satisfying to get explanations, but at the same time I wonder if the book wouldn’t have been better off without this, leaving the whole thing as an exercise for the reader to untangle themselves. As it is, it feels like a version of House of Leaves that ends with a fifty-page chapter that gives you all of the solutions to the puzzles.