Pseudonymous author Uketsu, a YouTube sensation with almost two million followers, sports a black body stocking and white papier-mâché mask and speaks in a digitally distorted, childishly high voice in his videos. Readers can exuberantly thank translator Jim Rion for enabling Uketsu's Japanese bestseller Strange Pictures for English-language enjoyment. This enigmatic novel, enhanced with disturbing, cleverly placed drawings, is undoubtedly a creepy fun fest.
An untitled preface and four chapters compose Uketsu's narrative, and each section builds on--and slyly topples--prior revelations. He opens with a professor and former psychologist who presents and analyzes the first drawing: a house, a girl, a bird in a tree. The first chapter features two members of a college paranormal club who initially seem unrelated to the book's preface but who become obsessed with an obscure blog that abruptly stopped after the author "figured out the secret of those three drawings." Chapter 2 involves a drawing that five-year-old Yuta makes for a Mother's Day project at school. A scrawled sketch on a receipt in the third chapter reveals the identity of an art teacher's murderer, three years after the crime. The fourth and final chapter deliciously explains all the interrelated details, including truths concealed in the initial image.
Uketsu is a meticulous storyteller who easily manipulates readers into agreeing with what the characters believe, even as he plants devastating, incriminating clues in plain sight. The blogger's stunted reactions to his pregnant wife's drawings, for example, are sweetly innocuous, but they hold the answers to multiple murders. Uketsu's deftly controlled whiplash effect will inspire a single-sitting thrill. --Terry Hong