NEW STUFF: Strange Houses - Uketsu

Here we go again. Another puzzle laden "mystery" novel has arrived fresh from the pen of Uketsu and the English language translator Jim Rion.  It's Strange Houses (2025, original Japanese edition 2021) and this time instead of a variety of unusual picture puzzles that are supposed to reveal the hidden motives of the criminally minded characters in its pages (Strange Pictures) we have an assortment of floor plans of deviously designed homes.  But it's more of the same -- contrived story meant to nest inside some silly puzzles that are not too puzzling.  The preposterous story, once again devoid of any fundamental understanding of humanity, reminded me of a 1974 TV movie called Bad Ronald I saw when I was a teen that has stayed with me for decades. Quite a campy bit of psychological horror, wild and preposterous, but in the end utterly human. It was based on a cult crime novel by John Holbrook Vance, about a boy who commits a murder and is secreted away in a hidden room. Then his mother dies, the house is sold and.... well, you probably can guess at the rest.  Bad Ronald is way more thrilling and creepy than Strange Houses which has a similar conceit at its perverse center.

Uketsu's excessively Gothic story is informed of macabre murder novels, a family curse, revenge noir and --of course-- cruelty. An attempt to redeem the plot with a character who tries to invert the curse by not committing murder is weakly handled and seems more like a 21st century fairy tale than non-violent behavior resembling something a real human would do.  But of course these are only characters in a book, right?  It's OK to shun any guise of reality because of that. I guess.

With lines like this:  "..would anyone really sacrifice their whole future for a school sweetheart?"  I came to resent the author and the book.  That line contains the basis for hundreds of well known novels, stories, plays and movie scripts. It is a sentiment that is the foundation of timeworn storytelling where something real and human and relatable is at stake. That the author ridicules such a notion speaks volumes about who he or she is and why Uketsu writes soulless nonsense like Strange Houses. Rather than embrace humanity, a more challenging pathway, Uketsu reduces the risk and adventure by piling on excesses reminiscent of 18th century Gothic horror novel conventions: deformity, obsessive love, paranoid fear, and "brainwashed" people compelled to commit murder because they have been cursed.

I'm done with Uketsu. These are not novels. They are naive puzzle books drawing on video game notion that violent revenge is the only recourse. The narrative is skeletal, the dialogue is rendered in script format adding an off-putting dispassionate layer to the entire framework. Strange Houses seems more like an instruction manual with all the real tools of fiction writing -- human characters, metaphor, descriptive and rich language -- completely stripped away to make way for a bare bones structure of logic puzzles onto which a flimsy and outlandish plot is attached. There's pulp fiction and there's trash fiction. A third English translated book from Uketsu came out this year -- Strange Buildings.  I won't be going to the open house.