Reading Room Radio: Strange Buildings

Esteban just read the latest book by Uketsu, and he shares why all three of the series are worth your read. 

Title: Strange Buildings

Author: Uketsu

Reviewed by: Esteban S.

Created by the Podcast Team at the Harris County Public Library.
www.hcpl.net

Podcast Team Members include: Beth Krippel, John Harbaugh, Mary Mink, Dylan Smith, Sadina Shawver, Alinda Mac, John Schaffer, Jennifer Finch, Katelyn Helberg, Darcy Casavant, Darla Pruitt and Nancy Hu 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Harris County Public Library's Reading Room Radio, where your to be red pile gets a little more exciting one micro podcast at a time. My name is Esteban. I am an adult program librarian at Freeman Branch Library. So I do read a lot, mostly horror or sci-fi or thrillers. So the book I wanted to talk about today is Strange Buildings by the author Uketsu. They're a Japanese author that actually goes by a pseudonym and they're like completely anonymous. So they've never shown their face in public. They're always wearing like a full black Spandex bodysuit with like a very creepy mask. Strange Buildings is actually the third book in their trilogy of Strange Things. So their first two books were Strange Pictures and Strange Houses. And I really enjoyed both of those books. They kind of were like famous on TikTok or the internet in like horror novel spaces for being really unique and eerie mysteries. As the names imply, they kind of revolve around these weird objects. Strange pictures revolves around creepy and strange pictures drawn by different people, seemingly unrelated, but the mystery always like connects all of them in a really interesting way that you don't expect. Strange Houses is about one particular house that is built strangely, and the author is kind of an investigative journalist, and they enlist the help of an architect to figure out like why this house is built the way it is. And then they suspect that it's used for murder or drugs or like for some nefarious reason. So I really liked both of those books, especially Strange Pictures. So when Strange Buildings was announced, it came out earlier this year in February 2026. And my friend immediately bought a special copy from Barnes Noble and lent it to me because she knew that I liked them. Strange Buildings was really interesting, in particular because it's almost double the length of the other two novels. So I was like, wow, this is a lot more than I'm used to reading by him. But Strange Buildings is unique in that it kind of takes a more anthology approach. So there's a lot of short stories of people involving strange buildings, either strange things that happen to them in the buildings or similar to his other books, where the architecture of the house is odd for some reason. And you have about 11 different stories that all are seemingly unconnected. And then once all of the stories are told, then the author meets with his architect friend and they kind of go through the mystery and they analyze each story and they start piecing together the strings that connect all of the stories. And there's a nefarious construction company and there's a mysterious cult, and there's people that you find out are related that is like shocking. And it's just really cool. It like really keeps you it keeps you going. It's a real page turner. I know I sometimes have a hard time reading if something doesn't like keep my attention, and this book kept my attention the whole way through. Like I needed to know what was gonna happen. The edition that I read actually had an interview with the author at the very end, and he's very jokey, you know, and he's like joking with the interviewer, and there's pictures of him in like he says it's his house that he lives in, but it's all like dilapidated and dirty. So I don't know if that was like a joke or not, but he says something about strange, either strange apartments or something else strange. So I think he is planning on possibly writing more. Hopefully. It's really cool how it's kind of uh escalated from like something small to one house to now multiple buildings, and like all of these stories take place across over a hundred years, all in different parts of Japan. And then he kind of finds out how they're all related to each other. And I will say these books are definitely more, they have more of like a true crime vibe where the horror is like people's actions or something going on in like their personal lives, more so than like anything supernatural, which is what drew me to the books in the first place. Is I thought it was going to be supernatural, and then it kind of like fakes you out, but I ended up enjoying it.