coriander in pho

“It was clear you were so annoyed with the previous two books. Why are you still try reading this one?”

“Each one of them is RM 70 at Kinokuniya. Times three, RM 210. That alone can buy all four of us decent meal at Salmon Dee Kap. I have to finish this.”

— The conversation between Ari and I last night when he saw me entered Screaming Marmot mode yet again

Okay, you know what, Imma just going to use a meme here.

“Strange Buildings” consists of eleven seemingly-separated cases of, well, weird house/building plans that ended up interconnected as one huge case (hence the meme). It’s also titled as “Strange Houses #2”, so, yes, the conversationalist-style is back.

That said, I noticed more improvements on this novel compared to “Strange Houses”. The scenes depicted were more detailed and the dialogues were not as choppy as before. “Strange Houses” felt like the first draft, and this novel felt like the said draft improved after good several sessions of feedback and meetings with the editor.

In fact, my favorite part is this one, on the File 2: Nurturing Darkness.

In “Strange Houses”, such off-hand ramblings like this wouldn’t appear anywhere on the novel. Everything was smack dab bam pow right-to-the-point, and that was one of the weaknesses of the novel; that’s why I was pleasantly surprised to see the dialogue between the Author and Iimura-san happened in this way for this novel. It gave such a breath of humanity on the character. It also makes the prose less juvenile.

Now, I still wouldn’t give this novel a pass, mostly because I found that the whole thing was… … not my cup of tea. With the risk of spoiling the story, this novel is built around a cult and conspiracies, and I really can’t relate with it. I might can relate and enjoy it when I was younger, like, what, 20-25 years ago? I was neck-deep in conspiracy theories and Nostradamus at that time. Now? I found myself yelling while reading this on how these characters would be better off if they would just go book an appointment or two with psychologists or psychiatrists and save everyone’s day, much to the terrified looks from my husband and kids because it’s very very rare of them to see me reading book and being agitated.

I also took offence on how this book wrote such abuse inflicted upon women, yet it ended up making the victims became responsible for the whole saga. Most of the times, I felt like this “macabre and thrilling!”-aspect of the book was written for shock value only. As “hook”. As “something to keep the audience engaged amidst the sea of algorithms”. There, I said it.

When I wrote about “Strange Houses” a couple of days ago, I approached Uketsu’s background as a YouTuber with neutral feelings, but now I wonder if their job as a YouTuber made them feel that they have to spoon fed their readers all the time, or if that’s how their audience and fans are right now: Things need to be simplified with big letters and arrows. A lot of the situations on the book were perfectly okay in text, yet we kept getting “here’s a chart! Here’s a graphic to show you!” multiple times.

Now that I have read the whole series (I hope), I would say that this series would suit well for young readers/teenagers, especially those who enjoyed mysteries, with a large caveat that if you are hoping stories with well-written characters and solid plot, this series would still have a long way to go. This series might also fare better had it been presented as manga series instead of text-based novels like this, which, they have done it. I would suggest you, whoever haven’t read this series in novel format, to just skip the novel and jump to the manga. At least that would lessen the awkwardness and weird pacing. Also, the author and their editor might want to ease off on the left hand business-thingy. At this point, I wonder what did their left hand has done to them, considering the weird laser-focus on this part of the body on two novels.

And now, I need Agatha Christie.