Like I said, this isn’t a super fun novel. But it is quite creepy. It reminds me a lot of Suicide Club if that movie had watched itself, and then wrote a novel based on it. Four Japanese high school students narrate this novel alongside a teenage boy who they suspect has murdered his mother with a baseball bat. But rather than be strictly horrified with him, they are somewhat obsessed with him. They give him one of their cellphones, they talk with him, they create lies about their own dangerousness in order to connect with him, and of course when it comes down to it, they get in over their head.
Aside from the implications of his crime, the boy, whom they call “Worm” actually is an interesting narrator who just so happens to have maybe killed his mother.
All in all this is a pretty good novel. I more or less read it straight through, but I couldn’t fully connect with it because it does have some level of abjectness that is just not very fun.
It’s more or less a lot like Megan Abbott novels….specifically her teenage novels like Dare Me, The End of Everything, The Fever, and You Will Know Me, and if you want to experience, fun obsessive, and creepy novels about weirdo teenagers, either of those or this one will work.
I am hoping that Kirino’s longer novels have a little more to dive into when I check those out. Apparently she’s written about 20, so I have some to choose from.