Strange Pictures is a unique horror novel that lets the reader piece together the mystery through pictures that accompany the text. I enjoyed the way the different stories were woven together and the mystery comes together. Suspenseful and fun! I am looking forward to the English release of Strange Houses.

Apparently I don’t hangout in the right places because I hadn’t heard of Uketsu until I saw this book. While I didn’t find this to be scary in the traditional sense, I definitely think it managed to be eerie, unique and a solid mystery at once. I love the sense of sleuthing having the pictures at hand added to this one and I found this to be a very quick read.

My very first Japan literature novel. It features an eerie, unsettling scenes but it’s like puzzle pieces scattered around and the reader has to figure out how the pieces might fit together, although Uketsu’s narrative slowly builds towards a big reveal finale. Throughout the book, there are Images that’s works as keys to solve these mysteries.

This was a gripping, entertaining experience, with surprising twists and turns.

𝙎𝙩𝙧𝙖𝙣𝙜𝙚 𝙋𝙞𝙘𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙚𝙨 𝙗𝙮 𝙐𝙠𝙚𝙩𝙨𝙪 is a series of eerie, interconnected mysteries, each tied together by unsettling, childlike drawings that serve as cryptic clues, pulling you deeper into a web of suspense.
Each tale is a brain-teaser, challenging you to decipher the hidden meanings within the illustrations. It’s like playing detective, piecing together clues that lead to unexpected—and often unsettling—conclusions. I really enjoyed reading this book and honestly, there were so many moments I just stared at the wall, trying to connect the dots.

What I find most intriguing is the author! Uketsu is a Japanese author who keeps his identity hidden—always masked and digitally altering his voice during appearances. This is his debut novel, and I’m already looking forward to whatever he writes next.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this eARC.

Uketsu's "Strange Pictures" is an interesting chance to play detective by having Strange Pictures as your guide.

The seemingly unconnected, yet joined stories and clues unfold with unsettling encounters with enigmatic figures. Uketsu masterfully manipulates the reader's perception.

The prose is evocative, imbued with a dreamlike quality that mirrors the protagonist's disorienting descent into the abyss of their own mind.

"Strange Pictures" is a challenging and a rewarding and enjoyable read. It demands active engagement from the reader, forcing them to piece together the fragmented narrative and pictures.

What a wild trip. There were a few scenes in this that will stick with me they were so genuinely spooky. Once the mystery starts to come together from the seemingly discrete chapters, it’s impossible to put down. I highly recommend Strange Pictures to fans of fair play mysteries. I’m eagerly awaiting the English publication of Strange Houses.

This book is nothing like I have every read before and I gladly recommend for any mystery lover out there! But take your time because it get’s very twisty.

Strange Pictures
Uketsu

4.5 / 5

Shorter stories that form a larger picture, Strange Pictures was like a creepy puzzle you have to put together with your eyes.

It's a truly fascinating book containing drawings that encourage you to play detective. I thought this book was creepy, dark, and fun.

It reminded me of Pulse and The Grudge. Just more thriller than horror.

Recommend!

4.5 / 5

I loved how unique this book was. I have never read a book that includes pictures that play a huge part in the book. I also loved that I got to play detective. Such a fun book that I would highly recommend!

I appreciate the chance to read this work as the publisher's e-ARC accessed through NetGalley. Strange Pictures is a scrapbook of stories interwoven with pictures. Both elements increase in intensity as the narrative pieces itself together before you. Readers have the answer while also being the detective of the larger components at play. Having heard of the Strange Houses manga prior to reading this work, this style of storytelling is compelling, yet unique to Uketsu--as there is a subtlety, I think, may be hard for just any writer to accomplish. I enjoyed this work immensely and will be reading Strange Houses when it is published later this year.

I tried really hard to get into this one, and while I'm really thankful to HarperVia, Netgalley, and Uketsu for granting me advanced access to this title, I think I'd much rather hand it off to a friend for them to take a stab at it.

Thank you HarperVia and NetGalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This was an interesting inception of a story! I love how everything slowly connected. I really enjoyed the pictures as a part of the mysteries and how each one played a role. There were a few parts in the middle of the story where I felt confused due to so many names important to the mystery, such as all of the students and journalists, etc. Without giving it away, the overall ending was a really satisfying conclusion.

CW: murder, violence, child abuse, death, death of parent, cancer

After reading literally tens of thousands mysteries throughout my life, I kept seeing the same recycled plots reused over and over again. I despaired of ever being truly surprised by a mystery again. Until I read Strange Pictures.

This book is a mystery that slowly comes together piece-by-puzzling piece. Each individual’s tale has its own conclusion. At the end of the book, the tales come together beautifully to reveal an overarching story. The book uses drawings that must be untangled to discover the mysteries’ clues. They are both visual and logical puzzles, which challenge the reader to process the book differently than a regular mystery plot.

I had great fun reading Strange Pictures. I highly recommend it to any mystery reader—but especially to those who feel there are no original stories left. 5 stars and a favorite!

Thanks to NetGalley and HarperVia for providing me with an advanced review copy.

I tried getting into it but just couldn’t. It is fairly slow but the way you can interpret the pictures differently was fairly interesting.

This was an intriguing little tale of a lot of events that slowly come together to form one heartbreaking tale. The pictures brought it all to life.

Visual horror...sequential art, film, artworks...isn't very effective on me. My idea of horror is Wrongness, and that's deeply individual in its iconography, therefore effective representation. I'm more afraid of people than Supernatural Forces because the Supernatural, by definition, can't be identified until we know all the laws of nature, and know that we know all of them. Until then, everything that happens, including things that break the known laws of physics, are simply unexplainable but still not supernatural.

Reality stinks, mono- or a-theistic religious nuts. Miracles and superheroic gods are improbable but not impossible because nature is not even a billionth of a percent explained yet. Stay agnostic, it's the only defensible stance.

This effort at image-enhanced horror is very interesting, though I'm pretty convinced it's one of that most Japanese of stories, the eerie murder mystery. I've reviewed plenty of those. This is another one. It's...fine, perfectly readable (as a mystery), and in spots enjoyable. It's a complex puzzle, not at all easy or simple to solve. It defeated me. I was sure one particular thing was true, and it explicitly wasn't. That made the read much more interesting to me than it would've been if I'd been correct.

Like so many mysteries from Japan, the characters are more gesturally indicated than developed. Mystery-genre readers in the US are less tolerant of this than they could be; we tend to look for people to invest emotional energy in, not just puzzles that rake place in a brooding ill-defined space. I think the ideal reader for this story, among my Anglophone audience, is likely to be someone who really enjoys Julio Cortázar or Umberto Eco.

I was not particularly enraptured by the read until after I finished it. This was more akin to a storyboard pitch to investors about an idea for a horror story connecting some...suspicious deaths that were or could've been Influenced From Beyond than itself a horror story. Thinking about the read, which I finished last night after taking a week to read (in my habitual scattershot way interspersed with other books), I realized I was very, very successfully manipulated from the off. A child psychologist explaining how a little murderer's artwork provided clues to the reality that child operated within initially felt a bit <i>In Cold Blood</i>y to me. Should I believe the narrative? Should I be interested in *how* or <i>why</i>? Or permaybehaps what....
That's top-quality misdirection for that to work on a reader with sixty years' experience.

Will you love it? I doubt it; I didn't. Will you enjoy reading it? See my comps, if you love them you might get a charge out of this off-kilter, well-crafted read.

This was such an innovative and masterful way of weaving a mystery, and I nod my metaphorical mask in the direction of Uketsu. (Yes, perhaps the greatest mystery surrounding this novel is the author's true identity. Uketsu—literally "rain hole" in Japanese, is a masked Youtuber who, in all public and virtual appearances, dons a black bodysuit and white mask and electronically alters his voice—and he is changing the world of mystery writing in Japan and beyond. I'd never heard of him before this book, but after reading it, I'm hooked... much like the rest of Japan. He's very popular. But I digress. Back to the book review.) Strange Pictures is a psychological mystery with elements of horror, told through a mixture of prose and (quite literally) strange pictures. The story opens with a child's drawing, presented to a class of psych students by a child psychologist, who explains that, though the child murdered her mother, she showed a proclivity toward rehabilitation based on her art. (Yeah, we're immediately off to the races.) Later, we are introduced to more strange pictures on a blog, drawn by the blogger's young, pregnant—and now deceased—wife. Our last strange picture is a hillside sketch done by a murdered artist. Though these drawings, stories, and characters seem unrelated, the intricate and twisty web of mystery that Uketsu weaves slowly unravels as we read. Readers will delight in solving the mystery alongside the sleuths of the book. However, even self-proclaimed amateur detectives (such as yours truly) will likely be in for a pleasant surprise by the story's end.

The story is told in a simple, matter-of-fact way that I've found common in Japanese literature. Personally, I dig it. It's easy to read. The unique storytelling structure, though, is truly the star here. Our "strange pictures" are not the only drawings in the book; the story relies on other diagrams and graphs (such as apartment building layouts and timelines/alibis of murder suspects) to add weight and exposition to the mysteries. I am now a firm believer that nearly every book, and especially mystery and thriller tales, would benefit from the inclusion of such elements. The pictures and diagrams drew me deeply into the story and hooked me to the point where I had to finish this book in one sitting to get to the bottom of it all. Though this isn't so much a horror as it is a thriller, I did find myself reading with bated breaths at certain parts, most notably during the stalking episodes. The mysteries within these pages are top-notch, but the book also touches on more serious topics of motherhood, trauma, obsessions, possessions, and revenge. It was a great read, and I can't wait for it to take off in the States. More books like this on our shelves would make me very happy.

Read this if you love a puzzling, challenging mystery that you likely won't be able to solve yourself. Read this if you love a good detective novel or television show in the fashion of Sherlock or L from Death Note. Read this if you've exhausted all the played-out psychological thrillers by American authors and need something that's truly inventive and a one-of-a-kind read in the genre. Dude, just read this, and if you don't give it above three stars, come back to fight me in the comments.

I didn't originally realize that this was done by one of the creators of "The Strange House", a manga that started to release in English last year and one I am absolutely obsessed with. This book was great, and fits in really well with what I know of their other works. This was a short but compelling read, the mystery woven through out really kept me interested in what was going on. I loved how each story wove into the larger tapestry of the book. Just a really cool concept that was executed very well. I love stuff like this and I cannot wait to get physical copies in at the branch, I think a lot of our patrons will love this unique book.

I don't know what to say about this book honestly. It's a horror book told through innocent sketches drawn before death and interpreted after death. The pictures tell an unusual story by changing the way you look at the drawings and the many ways they can be interpreted. I found it somewhat slow but interesting at the same time. The book definitely held my attention thorough out and I enjoyed reading it.
I received this free ARC copy from Net Galley to read and give honest reviews, receiving this ARC in no way persuaded my review.
Thank you, Net Galley, for the opportunity to read this ARC.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.

I went into this book pretty blind, other than knowing it was in the horror genre. This was a quick read, at under 300 pages, separated into short stories. At first, I was a bit confused at the book’s layout with the short stories rather than a typical chapter-by-chapter book, but everything became slightly more clear with each paragraph read. The ending in which made everything click and I was amazed at the author’s craftiness with weaving short stories that all fit together to form a larger picture (no pun intended). Definitely recommend giving this one a read!