Book Review: "Strange Pictures" by Uketsu

I'd heard of this book before and when I did I'm not going to lie, it didn't really sound that interesting. Eventually, I caved and got it on my Kindle because I couldn't find it in the library. For a book with pictures, this was really well formatted on the Kindle, which is surprising. Apart from this though, I have an awkward opinion about this book. The beginning of the story seems very interesting but, as the story starts connecting and becoming more and more repetitive with all the drawings and stuff apparently have some 'secret' buried in them, I lost a lot of my original enthusiasm. It was a good concept, but perhaps it could have been executed better. It didn't feel as visceral and conceptually terrifying as the author perhaps intended.

One of the first things we find about this story is a set of drawings which seem to depict a woman or various women in varying stages of life. Even though I thought it was, in fact, a very clever depiction of the mystery to open with, it was a bit overexplained. The blog which stops in the midst of a pregnancy is another clever quirk about the book, in which the drawings apparently link to the woman who is pregnant. The final entry on the blog is definitely ominous but I worry that if I say too much about it, I'm going to accidentally reveal what's truly going on. The blog is picked up by a student from a paranormal club in 2014 and this triggers a long series of events of discovery.

The book takes place over a time period of around twenty-two years and each part of the book is connected to the last. I have to say that the opening of the book which I have discussed above is probably the best thing about it.

One of the other pictures is drawn by a child as his mother feels like she is being stalked and tries to evade the police. The mother, who is a widow, is constantly on edge and then, the child disappears. Another picture is one concerning the murder of a disliked art teacher, this is discovered by two journalists who aren't really paying attention to their main job. But it is the final chapter and drawings which bring everything together.

Okay, so know I've gone over the storyline to show you what the book is basically about without revealing too many of the plot points, let me tell you what is good and what is not so great about this book. The first is the amount of repetition and overexplaining that happens. There are some things that seem added in to make the book longer and it doesn't sit well with me. However, the book has a very strong start meaning that, even if you are unsure about whether you'll like it, you'll be drawn in from the beginning.

The writing is very unsophisticated and bland. I'm not sure whether it's just due to the fact someone didn't translate it very well (it was originally written I believe, in Japanese) or the writer just writes like that. Whatever it is though, it did sort of kill the atmosphere of the book for me. I'm a person that likes long, drawn-out descriptions in which things get eerie and paranoid. But this book seemed to have little to no atmosphere whatsoever.

It's also not really advertised correctly. The genre stated on many websites is that this book is a horror and a mystery (except Amazon which has it clearly labelled as a crime novel). I would say this more or less resembles new-age crime fiction than anything else. It's psychological yes, but not so much that we actually get a flavour of solving something. Yes, we are encouraged to participate, but the book isn't written well enough for a seasoned reader to care. I think the writer very much missed a trick here. Japanese Horror is definitely one of the greatest sub-cultures of horror on the planet and this book does not do it justice.

All in all, with a plot that is too short and a repetitive structure, this book reads like it might be better read by the younger, less attentive generation. One good thing about this book is that it could be used to get Gen-Z and Gen Alpha into reading. It's simple, snappy, it doesn't use elaborate language and the storyline moves pretty quickly.

***

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