In Out

It’s the end of 2015. For our narrator, every day is mostly the same; a visit to the local corner shop to retrieve a blue plastic bag of wine and off-brand cheese puffs before falling into the sofa crevice to get drunk, get high, and stare at the television.

He was ‘normal’ once – he held up a job at a fashion magazine (that his mother got him) and wore nice clothes and showered and cleaned his teeth and bitched about his boss. Now, the only people who visit are his busy, narcissistic mother, his annoying stepsister, Olivia, and the men he finds on Grindr to pay for his meals.

When one of his dates leads to assault, he finds himself suddenly sober and back at his mother’s, a fancy suburban townhouse that betrays her Scouse roots. As weeks go by, he starts to slowly unravel, along with their already complicated relationship, and when, months later, he’s asked to perform his duty as her son at a Women of the Year party in her honour, his past and present collide with catastrophic consequences.

At once a propulsive and hilarious debut that charges towards oblivion, and a dissociated depiction of queer loneliness and self-destruction, In Out gives us a new kind of antihero grappling with life in the runup to the Brexit referendum, exploring what it means to be untethered along with ideas of masculinity, class, family, and addiction.