I had a feeling that I was going to enjoy Out, but I didn't anticipate loving the book as much as I do now.

I devoured it in a matter of hours, mainly because I couldn't put it down.  I try to include a brief wrap up of the story before diving into my reviews, but this is one of those stories that is best to read blind - and I encourage anyone interested in this book to do the same.

However, I will say this.

When I first picked it up, I found the characters to be incredibly rigid.  The lens that Kirino curates for its readers is an almost surface-level one, for all of the characters fall into very distinctive and definable categories regarding their motivations, characteristics, ambitions, and actions.  There is a tangible chain reaction and the sequence of events unfolds almost like a series of neatly arranged dominos. But there is a certain allure that comes with the directness of the piece and, in turn makes its readers contemplate her characters and how they act as vessels for this society even more. 

All of the characters included in Out are in dire circumstances, whether it be poverty, a loveless marriage, ungrateful households, and more.  The four main "protagonists" all work the night shift and are isolated in a sense, still required to follow societal norms and expectations while being excluded from it all together.  The mothers are expected to provide for their families despite their family's apprehension to return the favor, and the women in this novel are intuitively expected to keep up with appearances despite an inability to financially do so. Their existence boils down to an intangible debt of sorts: womanhood - both physical and psychological - are something to give, to take, a form of currency that can leave them beneath another or stuck with a far worse fate.  Debt becomes something more than monetary, and life becomes something less than participatory.

That is precisely why I love this story so much.

While so many thrillers are hellbent on making their characters (to a degree) people that readers can empathize with, Kirino seemingly decides to do the opposite.

Instead of creating a cast that is so multifaceted to which they all seem the same, where they all have the same tragic backstories and deep seated longings for love and acceptance into a society that will not, Kirino flips the script.  She locks her "protagonists" into bleak boxes by which they cannot truly escape from and puts her "antagonists" into this repetitive narrative which, ironically enough, makes them the most questionable, the most vile, the most grotesque.

I'd like to believe that this was Natsuo Kirino's intention: to force us to view her characters not through an all encompassing humanistic lens, but through an almost inescapable societal lens. 

I see people boiling this novel down to "gory" or "a vengeance story" or "about female rage" - and while these are both very true I see this work as something more.   It is gruesome and gory, and while at times it is incredibly nihilistic, impersonal, and logical to a fault, there is a certain degree of perversive compassion that coincides with Kirino's carefully curated carnage.  I found myself rooting for these four women not because I wanted to see them "be free" or "learn from their mistakes" but because I wanted so desperately for them to break out of these molds, these debts, these circumstances that they wound up in and ultimately put themselves in.  They were characters that evidently grappled for some sense of autonomy but wound up stuck in the same cycles that they started off with which made this story all the more frustrating, but I think that's what Natsuo Kirino was going for all along.  

All in all, Out subverted my expectations for what a psychological thriller should be, and for that I give it a standing ovation.