Above all other things, Strange Pictures is a story that highlights the importance of perspective. Reading it is like viewing a sprawling, elaborate murder-diorama, but with a zoomed-in point of view that only allows for a few things at a time to be visible.

Strange Pictures opens with the assessment of a child’s drawing in a psychology class. The child is introduced as a girl who was arrested for murdering her mother when she was 11 years old. The professor points out several peculiarities in the drawing: how a smudged smile might indicate that it had been drawn and erased several times, and how the child’s simple rendition of a house lacks a door. These things, the professor explains, are windows to insights into the child’s psyche. The lecture concludes with the revelation that the girl is now all grown up and living happily as a mother.

The class sets the tone for the rest of the novel. Each of the book’s three chapters is a different story set in 1990s or contemporary Japan—a different portion of the greater diorama, so to speak. Each one features a drawing or a series of drawings, and very much like the child’s drawing in the prologue, they are not what they initially seem. It’s fascinating to follow along as an observer of the process as the characters decipher the significance of each picture.

Each drawing gradually expands our perspective, revealing unexpected connections. It’s a unique way of delivering a story. Assumptions are introduced, inverted, and shattered. Seemingly unimportant people and events take on a whole new significance once their role within the diorama is made clear.

Author Uketsu—by all accounts a mysterious figure himself—has a knack for the quiet and eerie. Each scene and each event is described in sparse and simple language. It’s in the negative space where the horror resides. Much like the simple drawings that each chapter is structured around, the text holds the suggestion of a deeper and darker terror in what’s not outright told.

When the terrible things finally happen, they almost feel welcome. In its most horrifying moments, Uketsu fulfills the promises that Strange Pictures initially makes: that violence and tragedy are lurking in the unseen spaces of his minimal prose. Each incident is a release and a further step back from the diorama, until all is made clear at the very end.

For all its bleakness and cruel indifference, Strange Pictures ends on a hopeful yet hanging note, as if perhaps the full picture revealed might mean an end to the cycle that the diorama depicts. While a definite answer to that final question might arguably remain unsaid, we are left with the satisfaction of a full and final scene—the kind of satisfaction that comes from a puzzle finally put together, or perhaps more appropriately, from a detailed drawing finally completed.

Horror and mystery lovers will find Strange Pictures to be a short, haunting, and rewarding read.