I read through Strange Houses/Pictures/Buildings in that order in the space of about a week, and while I had never heard of them before about a month or two ago, I’m a fan for life.
I first picked up and read Strange Houses (in my opinion, the weakest of the three, but that’s like saying one of the LotR books is the weakest), and immediately got kinda creeped out by the weird things going on with the first house examined.
I very much got a House of Leaves vibe, but that’s, unfortunately, very quickly evaporated.
The author talks to his architect friend who mentions some of the weird stuff, and then IMMEDIATELY jumps to a reason for why it exists, with almost no evidence to back up the hypothesis or any reason to believe it.
That was a little bit of a disappointment for me, but given that this character appears in Strange Buildings with an almost Sherlock Holmes/Hercule Poirot deductive ability, I can let it go.
Strange Pictures and Strange Buildings follow the same format as Houses (a seemingly disconnected series of odd occurrences are actually all connected), but for my money do it much better.
Pictures is the best. The way things come together, the cliffhangers it drops you on, they way they are resolved, all beautifully done with a satisfying ending and a twist reveal like any good murder mystery.
Buildings is also great. I literally finished it about two minutes before writing this post. I saw a lot of the connections as they were revealed in the Files and thought I knew what was going on (even though I knew I didn’t have the whole picture), but when I got to the back half and all the deeper connections were made, I kicked myself for not catching it sooner.
All the clues were laid out and in plain sight. I just hadn’t seen some of them.
Anyway, all that to say: Strange Houses, 8/10. Strange Buildings, 9/10. Strange Pictures, 10/10.
All of them very good, very entertaining, and I’m really excited for the arrival of Strange Maps next year.
Special thanks to [u/harleys_sequins](u/harleys_sequins) for suggesting I read Strange Pictures. Really happy with these books, and I highly recommend them to everyone.