Book 14 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! More or less on track. My link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there.

My reading this book was a moment of true serendipity! I happened to be wandering my local Barnes & Noble and was in the horror section when I happened to see the cover of Strange Houses (2025), by Uketsu.

The thing is: I don’t think the book was supposed to be in that section — it looked like someone had just dumped a book that they had planned to purchase, as there was also a Harry Potter book behind it. But the cover caught my attention and then the description of the book grabbed me. Less than 8 hours later, and I’ve read the whole book and am blogging about it — that’s how much it captivated me!

Strange Houses technically falls into the mystery/detective genre I believe, but the book definitely has incredible horror elements and it was weird enough to appeal to me.

When a young couple are looking to buy their first home for their family, they find what seems to be the perfect abode: almost brand new and in great condition. However, there’s something about the architectural floor plan that bothers them: a dead space on the first floor behind the wall in the kitchen with no seeming purpose. They contact their author friend (the unnamed narrator, simply called ‘Author’) to ask him about it. The Author in turn contacts his architect friend Kurihara to ask about it, and this inquiry leads them into speculation about the purpose of several design features that just don’t seem… quite right. In short order, the Author and Kurihara find that their investigation will lead them into quite dark places, including the discovery of a second house with similar seemingly sinister design, and perhaps horrific crimes that may still be ongoing.

This book is really quite unconventional and because of it is astoundingly compelling! The narration is coupled with actual drawings of the floor plans being examined, with updates to highlight the strange features and their connections with other parts of the houses in question. The book is therefore both a visual and a literary treat, and I couldn’t put it down once I started the first chapter out of curiosity!

The author Uketsu is also quite unconventional: a Japanese author and YouTuber of unknown identity who also makes short films as well as fiction. In public, he wears a white papier-mâché mask and a black bodysuit and uses a voice changer to mask his identity. (Reminding me a lot of another fantastic and unconventional author I’ve written about a number of times, Chuck Tingle.)

Strange Houses curiously reminds me of the movies Blow Up and Rear Window: stories about people who believe that they’ve discovered evidence of some sort of crime and try, using speculation and the scant evidence on hand, to figure out what’s going on.

The revelations of Strange Houses are quite satisfying — we learn much of what is happening, but with a few twists and turns we are left with some unsettling questions. One can tell that Uketsu is also an author of horror from this book!

As I noted above, this is a book that can be read quite quickly. I finished the whole thing within an afternoon, in large part because I didn’t want to stop. But the shortness of the experience was not a problem — the book was exactly as long as it needed to be, and a lot of the mystery of it will stay with me long after I’ve finished writing this post!