First published in 2021, Strange Houses is the debut novel of a Japanese YouTuber who goes only by the name of Uketsu. His videos (primarily in Japanese, though increasingly translated into English) often revolve around mysterious and ambiguous objects, which Uketsu presents to his audience while wearing a black body-stocking and a papier-mâché mask.

Speaking through a voice-changer that introduces a deliberate gap between what we see and what we hear, Uketsu typically frames these found objects as uncanny in one register before manipulating them to reveal a second, deeper strangeness. The videos are great fun, and it is easy to see why they are so popular.

As Uketsu’s audience grew, this success expanded into other forms: a series of novels, followed by manga adaptations and, eventually, a film. Strange Houses was his first novel and the work initially targeted for adaptation. However, it proved significantly less popular than his second novel, Strange Pictures, which was the first to be translated into English and is often treated as the opening entry in what has since become an ongoing series of three books.

I mention the character of Uketsu’s online activity and the fact that this was his first novel not merely to set the stage, but also to provide a degree of explanation. While Strange Houses is a formally unusual and visually interesting attempt at a mystery novel, it is plagued by technical missteps which weaken it to the point of distraction. These problems make considerably more sense once it becomes clear that the book was produced by someone whose dominant areas of expertise are visual and conversational rather than literary. Strange Houses is an interesting book, but I would struggle to call it a good one.

They say that everyone has at least one novel in them, but reading Elizabeth Hand’s Generation Loss left me with the uncomfortable sense that my skull had been cracked open and that someone had used scalpel and clamp to cut this book directly from my brain like a malignant tumour.

This was not recognition in the flattering sense of influence or affinity, but something closer to diagnosis: a feeling that the sensibility and anxieties animating the novel had long been growing within me, unnoticed, drawing nourishment from the same conditions of damage, attention, and exhaustion that the book itself anatomises.

Generation Loss, first published in 2007, is the opening novel in a four-book sequence that straddles the porous boundary between crime fiction and horror while returning obsessively to themes that recur throughout Hand’s work: artistic inspiration, psychological damage, ritual practice, and the long aftermath of contact with something corrosively real. Its appearance coincided with a broader literary interest in hauntology and psychogeography, and while any direct influence is likely accidental, the overlap is telling. Like those modes, Generation Loss is preoccupied with ruin, with memory that refuses to settle, and with futures that have already been foreclosed.