The mysterious Uketsu, who always appears wearing a mask and using a voice changer, has become famous in Japan thanks to his “sketch mysteries.” This short book is very innovative and well plotted. It compiles a few stories that revolve around drawings. They seem loosely connected to each other, but it’s not clear how. I was intrigued and pleasantly surprised when I discovered how all the pieces fit together. It really is like a jigsaw puzzle, you get the little parts that connect craftily and form a whole. I usually struggle to enjoy Japanese mysteries because I find them too cerebral. This is not the case here. I loved how the country’s culture influences the characters and situations. Some parts that I attributed to national idiosyncrasies were actually clues. As with many foreign books, sometimes it was hard to figure out who was who based on their names. This is not the author’s fault but only my own. Still, it wasn’t hard to follow the story. Anyone looking for an original, creepy and disturbing crime novel, this is worth reading.
I chose to read this book and all opinions in this review are my own and completely unbiased. Thank you, NetGalley/HarperVia.

This was a very unique kind of story. A series of pictures are at the heart of three different mysteries, with the pictures themselves containing hidden secrets. It opens with a prelude about an instructor breaking down the meaning of a child's drawing, followed by two university students finding an odd blog with a sequence of sketches, a mother being shown a somewhat disturbing drawing her son made in class, and finally a sketch found on the body of a murder victim. While the individual chapters/mysteries followed a common path found in Japanese mystery fiction, the drawings and the secrets they hold are absolutely original in their usage in the book. The deeper the story gets, the more shocking the truths to how the different chapters connect to the overall arc become, and the later pages in the book reveal amazing and euphoric surprises. An incredible mystery/thriller with touches of horror, Strange Pictures is fantastically refreshing and rewarding.

Gripping stories that weave together horror and a whodunnit-type mystery. Intriguing and easy to read - my only complaint would be that the style is a little too simplistic and makes the book read like YA, while the themes are adult. But I enjoyed this.

This was an interesting read. I enjoyed the puzzle aspect and how the stories were intertwined. Somewhere in the third story things began to feel repetitious for me personally, but overall I liked it and I would recommend.

Strange Pictures is a brilliantly-constructed puzzle of a book. I wouldn’t call it horror, exactly; it falls more in line with mystery or crime fiction. It begins with a psychologist describing how a child’s drawings can be used to determine their mental state, and from there branches out into four stories that seem unrelated at first, with the connections between them gradually becoming apparent.

Each story has a different set of characters and features a different investigation, and central to each story are drawings that reveal something important about a character or event. Uketsu encourages readers to look not just at the drawings themselves, but to consider their actual construction: what materials were used, the order in which the strokes were made. It sounds confusing, but the stories are told quite simply, while still full of intricacies, revelations, and twists and turns. Reading this felt like I was in a mental maze, with only Uketsu’s illustrations and diagrams to guide me through. My brain was working hard to forge the connections and see the clues that were right in front of me – and even when I thought I’d figured something out, I usually hadn’t.

Not only are the stories in Strange Pictures mentally stimulating and entertaining, they also invite the reader to think about artistic perspective and interpretation, and to consider how a simple picture can reveal – and hide – more than you’d expect. Thank you to HarperVia for the early reading opportunity.

I was drawn to this book because of the pictures and I am a fan of Hidden Pictures and that style. This book was a quick read and I loved not only the drawings but the visual explanations throughout the stories made it easy to follow along and hard to put down!

I love that it is 3 short stories that seem at first like they wouldn’t connect but they do! It made me want to go back and look at all of the pictures again!

Thank you NetGalley for an ARC copy of this book!

I had no idea what to expect going into this and i was hooked from the first story.

This book is by Uketsu, a Japanese YouTuber who uses an eerie voice changer and wears a creepy mask obscuring his identity. His videos are akin to creepypastas, showing viewers pictures and challenging them to uncover the hidden potentially sinister meanings behind them. This book contains nine seemingly different pictures like this that then weaves into an overarching mystery for the reader to unravel.

Strange Pictures was a very quick and fun read. You could probably finish it in a day and the way it's structured you might be compelled to. It's unnerving and exciting at the same time. I had a real good time reading and seeing the deeper complexities behind every drawing in the story.

This book would be perfect for fans of Hidden Pictures by Jason Rekulak, creepypasta, or mysteries in general

some VERY unusual pictures at the heart of this massively peculiar mystery in four acts: the first three each set up a scenario, one a student investigating a creepy blog with some odd pictures, one a woman and her kid's drawing of his home, and one a sleuth investigating a sketch made by a murder victim. None of the three seem to share any characters, and the only similarity is the emphasis on drawings as a tool of investigation. it's highly jumpy and quite intriguing, although I found the true plot fairly straightforward before it all finished unfolding in the fourth one. 5 stars. Tysm for the arc.

(3.5 stars rounded down) This was a short, quick read that was disturbing and mysterious and very fast-paced. It’s three separate storylines that are all connected in ways both surprising and obvious. I liked the mixed-media approach to the writing - many of the pages are taken up with illustrations related to the stories being told. I also felt at times that I was getting mini art lessons, which wasn’t unappreciated! The characters’ are pretty undeveloped, but this is a really plot-driven story, so that didn’t strike me as a detriment to the story. I was drawn into this quickly and read it in one sitting. It’s compact, surprising, and keeps your attention.

Wow, what an unexpected read! This is not at all the kind of book I would normally go for, but I was 100% enthralled and incapable of putting it down once I'd started reading. I will absolutely be ordering this, and I will recommend it to as many people as I can. It's an easy read, but it's one that you won't soon forget.

This book was something else. It really had me going with the way that everything locked into one another and how smartly everything was revealed. It was one of those books that makes you want to go back and read it a second time because having all the pieces in place gives it a different kind of enjoyment.

I honestly have no criticisms of this book. Even the villain of the story was likable and understandable in her own way. The writing was superb, the storyline flowed so perfectly, I just--yeah. I have no complaints about this book. This is quite possibly one of my most favorite reads of the year.

Thank you yo NetGalley for an ARC of Strange Pictures.

The illustrations caught my eye besides the premise. One of the many things the Japanese does well is horror so I was excited to read this.

I've never heard of the author since I'm not a fan of social media or YouTube. I guess he's like a horror Banksy.

The novella is structured around nine childlike drawings, each holding a disturbing clue about a murder case,

The author puts the mystery together in a piecemeal way, doing it out of order before providing exposition as to how all these characters and the story connect together.

It was pretty interesting and well done, though I got confused by the names and forgot who was who at times.

I liked the illustrations; it provided an eerie backdrop to the disturbing story and unsettling feeling you get as you're reading.

Hope the author writes more in the future!

Wow! Strange Pictures, an instant favorite, is unlike anything I've read before. Theses four, interconnected stories use "strange pictures" to convey the mysterious and horrific truth of what happens to these characters. This is a not a manga, but a puzzle of a novel with illustrations that are central to the overall plot. This 240-page book is a page-turner that I read in one day. I could not get enough of this story, and look forward to recommending it to friends and patrons alike. Uketsu is one of my new favorite authors and I absolutely cannot wait to read more of their work.

I requested this from NetGalley on a whim, and ended up really enjoying this one!

This horror best seller from Japan, which is now being released in an english translation, takes you through a number of short stories that together provide a bigger picture and reveal the books twist. It made for a compelling way to tell a story, and a quick read that kept me hooked. It's not the smoothest writing style, but I think that's just the nature of translated books and it didn't take away from my enjoyment of the story. I'd love to read more by this author!

Oh wow, I loved this book. It's like a picture mystery where you must decipher the hidden meanings of what you see in relation to the story they are woven into. The story is told in three parts with one or more pictures included that have to be 'solved' in the same way to make sense of the hidden meaning. At first, I wasn't quite sure how that would be accomplished, but then one of the characters references optical illusions and it began to make sense. I'm a huge fan of those!

But then all three parts are actually connected into the same story and that just blew my mind. If you keep that in mind at the start, you'll see little clues here and there that will help you tie everything together. The translation is where it gets tricky, as it's hard to tell if it's the author's writing style or the way it was translated. The dialogue is quite choppy and childlike at times. which isn't a problem for me, especially because the pictures are the main focus.

I've never heard of the author, Uketsu, but I researched them after reading this and can't believe what I've been missing. I'm not one for YouTube videos, but man, I really hope this is only the first in a series of stories. I devoured the whole book in one sitting and I already crave more! Plus I love the design of the cover. It drew my attention and then I read the blurb and that was it - I had to read it and I'm so glad I did!

While the rest of the stories were good, that first one is going to stick with me for a while now. This whole collection was a very cool idea put together well but the first story is easily the highlight for me.

This book was absolutely phenomenal. It gave Junji ito vibes with a mix of psychological horror. The pictures were added detail that was fun to go back and try to figure out with the characters, although I usually was unable to lol. I highly recommend this book!

This book was brilliantly clever. It kept me on my toes from beginning to end! I liked how all of the characters were related in some way.

Thank you, NetGalley and HarperVia for providing me with an eArc in exchange for my honest review. Publishing date: Jan 15, 2025

I devoured this book. Uketsu has written a story within a story within a story, and they did a wonderful job of keeping me invested and wondering how each drawing and character is connected. I feel like I’m going to be analyzing art differently for a while.
I’m only knocking off a star because I found the timeline and names to be confusing at times.

The title of this novella (written almost like an anthology) says it all. I'm not sure how to classify this but I guess sketch horror/thriller/mystery is a good way to put it.

All of these entries start differently with various characters yet it soon becomes apparent that they are all the same story. And it's one of those stories with twists waiting to be revealed and written in a style which makes it easy to follow but challenging to figure out. And I, personally, loved that.

The clues for these horrific bloody deaths are hidden in sketches, drawings, and pictures. It's about a mother's obsession and the murderous lengths family will go to in order to protect what they love.

It's beauty is in the simplicity. Like a game which is easy to learn but hard to master if that makes sense. This book hooked me from the start and kept my interest with jaw dropping revelations. It's a fantastic horror/murder mystery which reads like one of those true crime podcasts where "truth is stranger than fiction." Except this is fiction but told in a way which makes you believe. I highly recommend it.