Wretched Reads Horror Book Club: "Out" by Natsuo Kirino

The Wretched Reads Horror Book Club will hold its next meeting on Thursday, August 28 at 6 p.m. The book club, led by Small Doll Productions, will discuss the 1997 Japanese crime-thriller, Out, by Natsuo Kirino.

Please support the host venue with purchase of food or drink.

Plot:

In the Tokyo suburbs four women work the draining graveyard shift at a boxed-lunch factory. Burdened with chores and heavy debts and isolated from husbands and children, they all secretly dream of a way out of their dead-end lives.

A young mother among them finally cracks and strangles her philandering, gambling husband then confesses her crime to Masako, the closest of her colleagues. For reasons of her own, Masako agrees to assist her friend and seeks the help of the other co-workers to dismember and dispose of the body. The body parts are discovered, the police start asking questions, but the women have far more dangerous enemies -a yakuza connected loan shark who discovers their secret and has a business proposition, and a ruthless nightclub owner the police are convinced is guilty of the M**der. He has lost everything as a result of their crime and he is out for revenge.

OUT is a psychologically taut and unflinching foray into the darkest recesses of the human soul, an unsettling reminder that the desperate desire for freedom can make the most ordinary person do the unimaginable.

Host or Publisher RAD Baltimore