In the masked YouTuber celebrity’s books, amateur sleuths with a predilection for the macabre snoop around, happening upon unsettling clues everywhere they look
Do you feel as if your life has no meaning? Wondering what to do with yourself? You could start poking around your friends’ and neighbours’ lives, looking for dark conspiracies, like the next Pizzagate, hidden in plain sight. Or you could pick up Uketsu’s latest mystery novel. In the masked YouTuber celebrity’s books, amateur sleuths with a predilection for the macabre snoop around, happening upon unsettling clues everywhere they look. In the bestselling Strange Pictures (2022), it started with a blog of unusual drawings; in Strange Houses, his latest translated into English, a journalist’s friend sends over floorplans for a house the friend is interested in buying. But a few seemingly innocuous details – dead space in one wall and a spare bedroom – lead the journalist to believe it’s a house… (cue strings)… designed for murder.
Without my giving it all away, the book follows a trail of floorplans and wild speculation. Are a family using a feral child, hidden in a tucked-away room with secret passages, to commit a series of killings? It’s a fun, quick read – in a Dummies Guide to Murder Mystery sort of way. Imagine a YouTube video with the title, ‘KILLER child DEATH house – EXPLAINED!’ and you’ve got the feel of the book: talking through each step of deduction and discovery, peppered heavily with repetitive diagrams; a tutorial that makes you feel not so much like you’re the one solving the case, but that you too could be penning creepy whodunnits. The writing is flat, with exposition that leaves nothing to the imagination, while character is almost nonexistent, entities there to ferry one fact to the next place. If there’s any subtext that emerges from Uketsu’s books, it’s that family and tradition are the greater evils lurking behind each mystery. And if there’s any wider subtext to the success of Uketsu’s books, it’s that the vlog tutorial has infiltrated popular consciousness and is now a literary genre in itself.
Strange Houses by Uketsu, translated by Jim Rion. Pushkin Vertigo, £14.99 (softcover)
From the Summer 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
