Dying Messages Are Child's Play in STRANGE PICTURES (2025)

"I’ve finally figured out the secret of those three drawings. I can’t imagine the kind of pain you must have been suffering. Nor can I understand the depths of whatever sin you committed. I cannot forgive you. But even so, I will always love you."

Strange Pictures by horror Youtuber Uketsu is a multimedia psychological horror/mystery novel told (partially) in the form of pencil drawings, where the reader, as detective, has to figure out the hidden meanings in each image. Overall, I felt like I would have liked to see more drawings, not just because the multimedia gimmick was the best part but because then, I would've spent less time having to read it.

The book's prologue is an academic lecture about children's psychological drawings, in which the lecturer discusses how a person's subconscious character can be inferred from their art. Armed with this knowledge, we are then tossed into three short stories which all revolve around the mysterious significance of different drawings: 

1. Two students investigate an abandoned blog about the writer's marital life that abruptly ends with several years of content deleted and a cryptic final message that suggests that the blogger's wife may have predicted her own death. Her drawings before she died point to a sinister truth.
2. A young boy in a single-parent household goes missing shortly after a school assignment to draw a portrait of his mother. Is the unsettling cloud over the apartment in his picture connected to the man who has been following him home from school?
3. A widely-disliked art teacher is brutally murdered while hiking. On his body, the police find a sketch of the mountain view, which is oddly simplistic, despite being drawn with guidelines. Could this sketch somehow point to his killer?

Readers who prefer their clues more tangible may groan at the premise. But believe it or not, the book is as much fair-play mystery as horror. The psychoanalysis is a bit of a red herring. Rather than an obsessive hunt for ambiguous shades of subconscious meaning, each story/drawing has something in the way of a puzzle, dying message, or other specific material clue contained within it. This gimmick was alright for what it was, and the drawings were realistic and unnerving. My trouble with the mysteries boiled down to two other issues.

First, the pacing is extremely rushed. I don't want to lean too hard on the fact that the author is a video creator, but the content of Strange Pictures does feel quite bite-sized and social media-appropriate. The book's length is padded with PowerPoint diagrams of simple concepts. Key deductions and solutions are written in boldface, perhaps to facilitate reading it at 1.25x speed. This grated on me, but was not as big an issue as the second point: the solutions to the mysteries do not justify their respective tricks.

The last story (art teacher murder) frustrated me the most with this, because the initial explanation of the dying message is actually not half bad. The murder premise could have formed the basis for an acceptable hour of television. Except that the novel then tries to out-clever itself by flipping the explanation on its head with an additional twist that it does not have the page count to earn.

For a novel that opens with a psychoanalysis lecture, Strange Pictures really falls flat as a portrayal of realistic human behaviour. Mystery novels having unrealistic character writing is a critique stemming back to at least Raymond Chandler, but the characterization hoops being jumped through here are really quite extreme. The characters are constantly coming up with overcomplicated schemes while being absurdly passive towards their own imminent deaths. You really expect me to believe that a pregnant woman would (ROT13) erfvtarqyl npprcg ure zbgure-va-ynj cbvfbavat ure orpnhfr vg jnf jvgu fnyg cvyyf, naq vs fur qvq ercbeg vg, vg pbhyq or cnffrq bss nf na nppvqrag? Jul ner lbh fgvyy gnxvat cvyyf sebz fbzrbar jub jnagf gb xvyy lbh?! Sbe gung znggre, n zvqjvsr fubhyq xabj gung cer-rpynzcfvn pna xvyy gur onol, gbb.

As for the overarching plot (of course there's an overarching plot): again, the solution was disappointing, implausible, and felt over-explained to compensate for the lack of build-up with these characters. One case didn't even have a real motive. V xabj "fur whfg jnagrq gb or n zbgure!" vf jryy-gebqqra zvfbtlavfgvp zbgvir tebhaq, ohg abg jura gur punenpgre NYERNQL UNF N FBA. The big conclusion is "women are crazy", or perhaps "crazy people are crazy".

On Top Chef, celebrity chef Tom Colicchio often bemoans when chefs cook an ingredient "three ways". To paraphrase, if you make something three ways, you have to make three dishes perfectly, which you likely won't have time to do—so why not just try to make one dish perfectly? I would say the same applies to the three stories in Strange Pictures. If you took one of them (i.e. the third one) and made it three times longer, with more focus on the investigation and the characters, I think you could have had a solid story. As it is, the three very short stories hobble each other, with the only advantage being the twist that they are connected at all. 

I didn't like this book.