Book Review: Strange Buildings
One word, to start this review: Creepy.
Last night I finished reading Strange Buildings by Uketsu, a Japanese horror phenomenon translated by Jim Rion. Last year I read Strange Houses, the first in the series, and it was creepy and easy to read, and I enjoyed it a lot, so when I saw the newly published Strange Buildings at Books A Million last week (which I only get to go to when I visit family in Iowa), I had to grab it. And then I read it in three days.
The concept for both books is "using odd floor plans to solve creepy mysteries", and boy howdy is it a wild, creepy ride. Strange Buildings is a larger mystery than the first one, with more floor plans and more pieces to put together to solve the mystery. In traditional Japanese horror style, it's not jump scares or gore or terror that makes this scary, but it's the human evil, human suffering, and an underlying chill throughout that does it.
There were several spots where I genuinely felt creeped out, and I read the last hundred and fifty or so pages compulsively because I had to know how it all tied together. Because it was longer than the previous book, there were moments at the end, when the author is going through all the cases and putting the pieces together into a coherent story, where I couldn't remember some of the details, especially for the first few cases. But in the author's conclusion section it included recaps, so I wasn't completely lost.
There was just one point I was a bit disappointed by. In the first book, there's an afterward that reveals the unreliability of the narrator and turns some of the story on its head, leaving a very strong shiver right at the end. This one didn't have that kind of big revelation, and while it was a good ending, it didn't have quite the same creepy reveal.
If you like creepy tales or mysteries involving visual clues, I highly recommend Strange Buildings. 4 out of 5 stars.
Now I just have to find Uketsu's first book, Strange Pictures.