Wow. You know a book was good when you breezed through 520 pages in two days.

This really took me back to the days of watching shows like Game of Thrones or Breaking bad, as weird as that sounds. You've got all these different character perspectives intertwining, you've got gore and tension, sex and crime and everything is rushing towards this ending which makes it feel like the walls are falling down around the characters. I loved that this had the tension and anticipation of a crime novel, which it essentially is.

The moral ambiguity of this story is utterly fascinating, and judging by other's reviews; specifically, their thoughts on the ending. I can tell the author has done a great job at blurring the lines of what crimes are deemed as justifiable and which ones aren't.

Let's get things straight, Masako is a bad person, and the fact that other readers are shocked that at the end she bonds with an equally awful person is surprising to me. I hate to sound pretentious and like a know-it-all, but I genuinely believe people are mad at the ending because they're blinded by their conceived notion that Masako is somehow a morally good character who just happens to be struggling. She's monstrous, and when she finally, in her own words meets someone who is just as empty and devoid of goodness as her, she wants him to stay, despite the awful things he's done. That makes total sense to me, birds of a feather flock together.

I honestly struggle to write in-depth reviews about books I loved, I feel like it's often better preserved in my memory if I don't try to articulate every aspect of it. What I will say is that it brought me out of a reading slump and has encouraged me to tackle other long novels with grisly plots. 

If there's one particular thing this story has made me think about, it's this: that there are varying degrees of bad, but all bad actions are reprehensible, nobody can justify hurting someone else under any circumstance, it will ruin your conscience if you're even remotely a good person. We often describe hell as being bottomless, and the story of "Out" is an example, you can always sink lower, depravity has no limits.