Strange Pictures

Finally a win for a Waterstones random pick up! I came across Strange Pictures and picked it up purely for its premise of murder mystery with visual elements, the idea of being given some drawings and scenes to analyse to try to figure out the mystery along the way sounded quite fun and for the most part it was.

I was initially worried about it being a Japanese novel as my last light novel was not a pleasant experience and even with the best of efforts, translations from Asian languages tend to always lose something as some language subtleties simply cannot be transmitted faithfully. For the most part I was happy to be proven wrong, Strange Pictures only mildly leans into “anime clichés” with the unmissable “So this is what he meant” and a narratively irrelevant element of a teenage girl being in love with her much older teacher. The translation seems good, grammar is on point, but it does feel the same way that anime subtitles do. By that I mean that whilst functional, everything feels rigid, there’s very little flow to the narration and emotions carry quite poorly over to the reader. Anime gets away with this because we still get the voice acting and animation but in a novel it does feel a bit sterile. This includes a scene where a character is methodically beaten to death and they are seemingly calmly and logically thinking through ways to get out, it just feels a bit off.

That didn’t stop me from reading through it in just a couple days, it’s still a very competent page turner. The chapters are quite long and there’s only 4 of them but I just could not bring myself to stop mid chapter and it was just as difficult to not keep reading after finishing a chapter although it does lose some of its steam at the end. It’s definitely a book that is stronger in its first half as it draws into an almost horror vibe with suggestions of something paranormal happening, mobilising a fear of the unknown. However, by the time I hit the second half, I had started piecing everything together replacing the eeriness with the comfort of knowing, and whilst still quite dark and slightly depressing, the resolution simply wasn’t as grim as I had thought it would be. Despite its name also, the “strange pictures” not only get less numerous, they also just get less creepy as the story moves along. We start off with a multi picture puzzle revealing a sombre message, moving into the mystery of a disturbing child’s drawing and close out on a, in my opinion, far-fetched analysis of a landscape drawing. Chapter 4 doesn’t even really have a drawing, it calls back to the prologue’s drawing with again a far-fetched analysis with a child psychiatrist solely relying on that drawing for their diagnosis. The lack of elegant prose definitely makes the non-picture driven chapters feel a bit slow and uninteresting even if there is a satisfaction in reading the resolution and how everything clicks together.

It feels a bit like a wasted opportunity as I do think there was something more that could have been done with the concept. The story is told anachronistically but there’s no reason for that outside of obfuscating information from the reader as if read chronologically the mystery is incredibly easy to solve (this isn’t Hercule Poirot or Knives Out) and the author doesn’t do anything with the anachronistic story either (this isn’t Memento). This is especially frustrating as the first chapter has us follow a teenager who’s looking into the mystery through an old blog and printed out pictures. In that context having clues from different time periods show up as they research and it all eventually linking together would be much more satisfying. Instead through the time jumps we follow the protagonists of the mystery the teenager was looking into and I found that a bit less interesting.

Nevertheless, I had a good time, it doesn’t overstay its welcome, doesn’t try to be bigger than it is and it does the job at entertaining and giving a little thrill along the way.