First of all I'll admit that this was an impulse purchase. I was scrolling through Youtube Shorts late at night (nobody's perfect) and I saw some guy recommending cool books he'd read this year. He then showed a book called Strange Pictures, where there is a puzzle to be solved with information gathered from the titular Strange Pictures.
I and many other people were given the impression that this would be a puzzle you'd have to solve on your own, but no, it does follow a traditional story structure with characters and all that.
I wasn't really upset by that but a lot of the comments I read about this book were so I was kind of expecting it to not flow very well before I'd even received the book. Given that the author is a youtuber themselves who does... whatever this is, I was kind of excited to see if this would maybe be the world's first attemp at translating internet unfiction into a traditional book format.
That's what I thought going into the first chapter, where the solution involves resizing some of the Pictures which is obviously a task for a computer (the characters use a printer). I won't spoil what the other chapters' solutions but they're made for the characters to solve instead of the readers so my expectations got thrown out quickly.
I had this whole thing prepared about how this book could have maybe worked better as a piece of internet unfiction, and how that despite its flaws as an attempt to translate one of those into a book it was still cool that it was bringing these sorts of puzzles to readers who aren't chronically online.
But no, the book didn't end up being that. So now I have to write an actual review I guess.
I think starting off with a puzzle that can only be solved if you have access to the pictures outside of the book is kinda bullshit, but I do think its placement fits better here than as the last chapter. The setup of an abandoned blog with hidden clues to a possible murder is a really fun one and it got me hooked immediately.
The second chapter is pretty fun, it subtly connects to some of the leads brought up in the last chapter and it also involves a character overanalizing one of the puzzles because she'd been primed to do so. Which I think is a pretty funny poke at people like me who thought this was going to be an ARG type thing (though I'm not sure it was intentional).
The third chapter... I don't know yet. On its own it's probably the one I liked the most. The puzzle was fun, it manages to involve all of the characters mentioned so far and it ties the whole story together pretty well. It does leave some things unexplained, but they're points I'd have been okay with theorizing on my own.
Then in the last chapter they just explain everything and reveal the motivation of all the characters. Which sucks but I still liked the book in general.
I'm looking into another one of this author's books, Strange Houses, and people say the overexplained ending is done even worse. But these people also missed some details in Strange Pictures that are literally told to your face so I'm still willing to give it a chance.
The pictures were pretty strange, after all. Maybe those houses are too.