Strange Houses by Uketsu
Odd floor plans suggest something sinister is afoot...
A couple is shopping for homes when they come across one they like… only there’s something odd about it that they can’t quite put their finger on.
Looking at the floor plan, they realize that there’s a mysterious dead space between two rooms that seems to serve no purpose. Maybe it was intended to be a closet, but then why was a door never added? Why is it walled up from both sides?
The more they puzzle over the strange house, the more they notice other things about the property that are inexplicable and unsettling:
A downstairs bedroom has no windows to the outside, yet it does have one that looks into the living room.
Upstairs, the entire floor seems to be arranged around a central child’s bedroom which is insulated in the home’s interior — with no windows at all.
The house-hunting couple ask some friends (an authority on the macabre and a draughtsman) what they make of it all — and they speculate that the house was intentionally designed in this odd way for a single purpose:
It is a murder house.
That is, it’s a house that was specifically designed to murder people in. That’s why there’s so many rooms concealed within without windows — and why there are, contrastingly, so many windows on the exterior rooms. So that the house doesn’t look suspicious from the outside. So that it’s easy for people to look in, without any chance of anyone seeing anything the killers don’t want them to see. It’s the best camouflage possible.
And then they discover another house. Turns out it was owned by the same people that previously lived in the first one.
This second house is also strange. Of course! It, too, has a secret room that serves no obvious function and a child’s bedroom without any windows.
And bodies have been found nearby these houses. Surely, their insane theory is correct! These were murder houses and there is a family of killers out there that moves around the country, secretly killing people while masquerading as average everyday people!
As the investigation descends further down the rabbit hole, a disturbing family history comes to light. But even then, the full truth remains elusive.
Strange Houses is a novel written by the enigmatic internet personality Uketsu, and leans heavily on a series of floor plans throughout — this is, in a way, a picture puzzle with prose.
Translated from Japanese, the text is fairly formal and unemotional, a style that puts us at a remove from the dire drama — the opposite of that we’re more familiar with in horror fiction. Regardless, the mystery keeps you utterly intrigued and invested.
It’s an interesting approach not just to telling a scary story, but to exploring a mystery. This isn’t an action-and-consequences plot-driven thriller, it’s a methodical, speculative, let’s look at this from all angles chiller — and a welcome antidote to much of the exposition-oriented popular culture of the moment.
It does, perhaps, get less horrific as the book wears on (although that is probably different for different readers). I found the mysterious first half far creepier than the latter half, when questions start getting answered, but isn’t that always the case? Fortunately, the book ends on an unsettlingly unresolved note, so that even though we now understand most of what happened, we’re still unsure exactly how or if things have concluded, or who was entirely trustworthy.