Review: Long ago, before I became a author, game designer, and general worldbuilder, I was a civil engineer. And as a result, I have always had a fascination with buildings and how they work and grow over time. In particular, I find blueprints and floor plans interesting, in what they say about the house and people who live there.
Strange Houses is set in modern Japan. The narrator, an author of macabre fiction is approached by a friend who is homebuying with his spouse. And they found a excellent modern house, but there was just something off-base about it. And they sent the floor plans to the author, who quickly noticed some things that were off-kilter. He brought in an architect friend and together the two start unspooling a mystery, which quickly turns disturbing and horrific.
The book produces the house plans, as well as other house plans as the story unfolds, along with family trees and timelines. And these are presented in the running text as well, allowing the reader to discover the evidence as the author does. Now, I read a lot of old detective novels from the 20s and 30s, and in such venerable tomes by Christie and Van Dine, they provide floor plans as well. In fact, putting a map or house diagram on the back of paperback editions was a thing back there. So that's not much of a surprise, but what the book does is that was they learn more about the house(s) they make changes to the house plans to reveal new ideas.
So there are clues in the house plans, which is cool, and I noticed most of them before the two investigators spelled them out in text. But, I also noticed stuff that they left uncommented-upon. In the plans, there is one large room on the second floor without any exterior windows. OK, that's odd (though my first thought was to ask if there was a skylight). But (and this is the weirdness they don't address) there also is one toilet on the floor, and you'd have to pass through the windowless room to get there. It is a little strange that the investigators that are looking really, really hard at the house don't call it out.
I've mentioned this before in my comments on various Call of Cthulhu products, where the maps don't line up with the text, or have their own discrepancies, like chimneys that are prominent on the first floor and disappear on the upper floors, or locations of kitchens and bathrooms that would be logistical nightmare regarding the pipes. So I'm sensitized to such things, and in this case seeing stuff that the (real) author would prefer me to miss. And if fact, at the time I wrote it off as simply "Well, they lay out houses differently in Japan", but I went to the trouble of looking up Tokyo floor plans (thank you, Internet), and nope, the ones here look like they make no sense.
In any event, the investigators make some immediate assumptions, which turn out to be mostly true, but the logic leaps are a bit much. And then they find a second house, where the family had previously lived, which also had some odd features. And then there's the family house, of more traditional design, which had its own sense of weirdnesses.
And all of this is presented in drawings and conversations between the investigators, and interviews with various people. It is all presented as evidence, in a fairly bloodless fashion (though there is blood in many of the descriptions and conclusions). In this way it feels a lot like Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu", where nothing really happens to the narrator as he goes through the files of his deceased uncle and comes to a chilling conclusion. Same here, though there are more questions than answers in the final tally.
The clinical approach of the investigators left me cold, and the fact that things are (maybe) not wrapped up neatly bothered me. The (real) author is a mystery figure whose photograph is a black robe and a white mask (very Studio Ghibli). The books (there are more in this style) are huge in Japan. I want to say that it is the cultural differences that ultimately frustrated me, but I think the translation is on-target.
It is ultimately a case that I bring too much to the book. I know too much about a subject and it brought me in conflict with the reality presented in the novel. And the ultimate loose ends and unreliable testimonies frustrate me, particularly in comparison with the venerable "The Call of Cthulhu". Strange Houses is a short, compact read (given all the house plan illos), but I can't really recommend this even to friends who have spent time in Japan. It was a misfire, though apparently a very successful one.
More later,
