If Masako’s cool-headed leadership as she helps dismember and dispose of Yayoi’s husband—and the way the women’s bond hardens under pressure—hooked you, Sharp Objects gives you another razor-edged portrait of dangerous, complicated women. Camille Preaker returns to Wind Gap to investigate murdered girls while navigating her controlling mother Adora and volatile sister Amma. The same steel-spined, no-romance look at female resilience and damage that runs through Out pulses here, sharpened by vicious family dynamics and a reporter’s relentless gaze.

If you were compelled by how Masako, Yoshie, and Kuniko cross lines to shield Yayoi after she kills Kenji—and how that cover-up becomes a way of surviving—My Sister, the Serial Killer will hit the same nerve. Korede keeps cleaning up after her beautiful sister Ayoola’s “accidents,” scrubbing blood and spinning lies with cold practicality. Like the disposal runs and alibis in Out, the book zeroes in on the chilling calculus of loyalty, self-preservation, and who gets forgiven when a body is on the floor.

If you appreciated Out’s unblinking descent—from the bento factory night shift to garbage bags of body parts scattered across Tokyo and the sadism orbiting Satake—Piercing offers a comparably dark trip. A seemingly ordinary salaryman, haunted by violent urges, books a hotel room to commit a crime, only to collide with a woman whose own scars warp the plan into a nerve-shredding duel. It’s the same neon-lit dread and intimate cruelty that made Out so unforgettable.

If what stayed with you from Out was the psychological acuity—Masako’s isolating pragmatism, Yoshie’s caregiving burdens, Kuniko’s vanity and debts curdling into desperation—Grotesque drills even deeper. Through clashing voices (including a caustic narrator) and documents, it reconstructs the lives of Yuriko and Kazue Suga, elite-school classmates whose paths slide into sex work and murder. The forensic attention to motive and self-deception mirrors how Out exposes what violence draws out of its women.

If the clinical dismemberment scenes and the relentless, bodily consequences of violence in Out made the book feel disturbingly real—right down to the packing tape and late-night trash drops—The Killer Inside Me delivers that same gut-punch. Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford narrates his brutalities in a calm, courteous voice that’s as chilling as Satake’s predatory menace, turning each beating and murder into an exercise in intimate horror.