Description:

Review

Navessa Allen’s Lights Out arrives with the kind of premise that practically dares a reviewer to take it seriously. A trauma nurse discovers that her favorite anonymous thirst-trap creator has broken into her house, filmed a video in her bedroom, and left his mask on her pillow—and instead of calling the police, she finds herself aroused. The man behind the mask is the son of an executed serial killer, and he staged the break-in partly to test whether he’s capable of his father’s evil. What follows is a dark romantic comedy in which stalking, knife play, and accidental homicide double as grief work, and a couple forged in mutual darkness ends up proposing marriage in a state-park stream after a kinky predator-prey chase. The setup is so flagrantly outlandish that it would be easy to dismiss the book as pure transgressive fantasy with a rom-com gloss. That would be a mistake. What Allen is actually up to is something stranger and more interesting: a sustained interrogation of whether inherited darkness can be rewritten through chosen desire, and whether consensual fear might restore feeling to people whom trauma has hollowed out. The novel is not without serious flaws—its thriller plot strains credibility, its treatment of consent will legitimately unsettle many readers, and its moral resolutions are cleaner than its questions deserve. But as a work of genre fiction willing to name and partially work through its own contradictions, it’s more ambitious than most.

The core argument, threaded through nearly four hundred pages of alternating third-person close point of view, is that performing monstrosity and enacting it are different things, and that the difference lies in the effect you have on the people you touch. Aly Cappellucci, the ER nurse at the center of the novel, has spent the decade since she accidentally killed her mother in a car crash at sixteen living what she describes as a robotic existence in “a world of grays.” She rescues green nurses, treats gunshot victims through mass-shooting surges at an under-resourced inner-city hospital, and hasn’t taken a day off in two years—all of it, the novel slowly reveals, a form of self-erasure dressed as competence. Her discovery that the masked social-media figure she’s been lusting after online has been inside her actual bedroom doesn’t terrify her into calling the cops; it awakens a hunger she can’t explain and doesn’t entirely want to. “This truly was the horror movie I would die in, wasn’t it?” she thinks, and the point is that the recognition of danger feels preferable to the numbness she’s been drowning in. The stalker, Josh, is conducting his own parallel experiment. The son of George Marshall Secliff, the executed “Ken Doll Killer” ranked alongside Bundy and Dahmer in serial-killer infamy, he was put on antipsychotics as a child by a discredited psychologist pushing a genetic-psychopathy theory, and he has spent his adult life terrified that the wrong medication or the wrong provocation will unlock his father in him. Dressing as a masked, knife-wielding predator on social media and breaking into a woman’s house are, in his private calculus, tests: does he want to hurt her, or does he want to give her pleasure? When he watches Aly masturbate to the video he filmed in her bedroom and thinks, “Yup, Aly was fucked up too. Hallelujah,” the relief is genuine. He has found someone dark enough to meet him.

The dual-POV structure is the novel’s most effective technical device. Allen alternates chapters labeled by character, letting the reader occupy both the stalker’s anxious tenderness and the stalked woman’s fear-lust over the same shared events. The parking-garage rendezvous in which Aly performs oral sex on a masked stranger and accidentally stabs his hand with his own knife, for instance, reads one way from her perspective—tense, reckless, a surrender to desire she can’t explain—and quite another from his, where we learn he has already swapped her bullets for blanks, packed her snacks, and scared off a catcalling truck driver with the same knife she will later turn on him. The double exposure manufactures the “consensual dubious consent” the book runs on. Aly publicly begged online to be “broken in on,” and when the fantasy materializes, she cannot bring herself to say the word that would end it; Josh insists he “took her at her word” while both acknowledge the arrangement “wouldn’t hold up in a court of law.” The novel is not interested in resolving the question of whether that arrangement is valid. Its eroticism depends on leaving the question open, on the appearance of overridden consent without its actuality—or at least without an actuality the characters will name. Readers who find that premise inherently indefensible won’t be persuaded otherwise. The novel knows this. “You are a sex-craved, sleep-deprived woman more interested in a kinky fuck than safety and comfort,” Aly tells herself. “It was oddly freeing to admit that.” The freedom is real for her. Whether it extends to the reader is a separate matter.

The kink scenes function as emotional-processing beats rather than set-pieces, and the most effective of them is the knife-handle ride in chapters fourteen and fifteen. Aly has just experienced a PTSD breakdown after treating a car-accident victim who resembled her dead mother. Josh, monitoring her through hospital cameras, rushes to her house, and the scene that follows—blindfold, handcuffs, the handle of his knife used for penetration—is carefully framed as catharsis. Aly rides the handle and, in the aftermath, weeps out years of buried grief. The scene is explicit but not gratuitous; it earns its release because the novel has spent a hundred pages establishing how much grief Aly has stockpiled and how thoroughly she has walled herself off from feeling it. When Josh later administers a full BDSM punishment scene—tied to the headboard, knife to cut away clothing, vibrating plug, rough sex—the dynamic has shifted from therapeutic release to something more like domestic ritual. The Faceless Man mask hovers above her, and when she finally removes it, “the Faceless Man became Josh again.” The mask motif operates as the book’s central metaphor for chosen identity: the same face that resembles a serial killer can be reauthored into a giver of pleasure and safety, provided the person behind it chooses to make it so.

The theme of inherited evil is literalized when Aly’s lab-tech friend Vern runs a DNA sample and discovers Josh is the son of the Ken Doll Killer. The revelation triggers the novel’s most interesting moral negotiation. Aly briefly panics, but Tyler—Josh’s roommate, her ex-hookup, and the novel’s reliable outside character witness—deflates the terror by explaining the discredited psychologist, the wrongful antipsychotics, and the fact that Josh exhibits “none of the more troubling signs.” “The fact that I’m still alive should be all the proof you need,” Tyler says, and the line lands because Tyler is vain and shallow and entirely unmotivated to lie about something this grave. Aly then supplies the reframe that becomes the book’s thesis: “You dress up like a scary serial killer but do the opposite of what your dad did.” She argues that Josh rewrites history by giving people pleasure rather than pain, and that his entire masked persona is an inversion of his father rather than a repetition. It’s a generous reading, and the novel wants us to accept it, but it’s worth noticing how much weight the argument has to bear. Josh surveils Aly obsessively, hacks her cameras and her laptop, breaks into her home repeatedly, threatens her mob-uncle by causing a house-wide power surge, and accidentally kills a man. The novel insists these are proofs of his difference from his father—surveillance in the service of care, killing as involuntary manslaughter rather than predation—but the distinction is thinner in practice than the thesis suggests. The book never quite resolves whether “doing the opposite” cleanses the inherited darkness or merely redirects it. That may be the point.

The thriller plot that occupies the back half of the novel is where Allen’s ambitions strain hardest against genre machinery. Bradley Bluhm, a billionaire’s son and serial rapist who walks free because his family buys off the system, breaks into Aly’s home with a kill kit of rope, chloroform, knife, and bleach. He is the real predator the novel has been distinguishing from Josh’s performed predation, and his predator’s eyes are identical to those of Josh’s father—a neat but overdetermined bit of doubling that makes the moral contrast almost too explicit. Aly and Josh subdue him, chloroform him, stuff him in a snowboard bag, and drive toward his latest victim’s family farm to deliver vigilante justice, only to discover en route that Josh accidentally covered both Bluhm’s mouth and nose with duct tape, asphyxiating him. “He put the duct tape over both his mouth and nose. He’s dead,” Aly registers, and then the novel does what it consistently does with its darkest moments: pivots into comedy. Aly pukes, then laughs. Josh coins the maxim “the couple who slays together, stays together.” The rapid tonal shift is characteristic of Allen’s method—comedy as defuser of genuinely criminal acts—and it will work for some readers and strike others as glib. I found it effective as a demonstration of how desensitized both leads have become, but the book never fully interrogates that desensitization. It keeps treating their growing comfort with body disposal, mob favors, and dirty cops as evidence of commitment and aliveness rather than what it might equally be: a deeper numbing they can no longer perceive as numbness.

The mob-family subplot introduces Aly’s Uncle Nico, a Sicilian-American “cleaner” who sanitizes crime scenes and runs a chop shop, and whose crew disposes of Bluhm’s body, chops his car, and stages a Canada-flight cover story. Nico is charming and threatening in roughly equal measure, and his presence gives the novel an opportunity to examine what people owe blood family versus the family they choose—a theme it handles with more nuance than the inherited-evil plot. Aly’s grandparents fled Sicily because of the mob; Nico’s decision to join it was “anathema” to them, and Aly’s coerced reentry into his world (monthly dinners are her “favor” for the body disposal) tests her evolving sense of loyalty. The novel’s position, ultimately, is that chosen family wins: Aly builds a domestic life with Josh, their two cats, and their ally Tyler, and the proposal in the epilogue ratifies that choice. But the mob subplot also exposes the central contradiction the novel never fully faces. The couple condemns Bluhm for exploiting a corrupt justice system—bribed judges, intimidated victims, procedural loopholes—yet survives only by exploiting the same corruption: dirty cops on the payroll, mob lawyers, bought silence. The book gestures at this tension when Aly admits vigilante justice is “problematic as fuck” even as she calls it “necessary,” but it doesn’t sit in the discomfort long enough to earn the complexity it raises.

The novel places itself self-consciously within the traditions it’s working. Lights Out is a dark romance in the mode of the morally-grey-love-interest trope it both inhabits and gently parodies—Josh’s surveillance and possessiveness are the same behaviors the genre typically codes as protective alpha-male devotion, and the novel knows this, naming Dexter and Joe as explicit reference points. It’s also a vigilante-justice thriller that openly theorizes private retribution as a rational response to institutional failure, placing itself in conversation with the rape-revenge lineage and a feminist critique of how wealth shields rapists. And it’s a trauma narrative that draws on BDSM-positive sexual ethics to frame kink—edging, knife play, praise-and-brat dynamics—as cathartic processing rather than mere transgression. The true-crime cultural immersion is thorough: DNA sequencing, fiber-analysis limitations, autopsy-smell recognition, behavioral comparisons to Bundy and Dahmer, and the omnipresent Netflix documentaries and “murderino” podcasts that haunt Josh’s life from the outside. All of this is competently rendered. The novel’s procedural grounding, from ER triage protocols to cybersecurity methods to mob body-disposal logistics, is specific enough to suggest serious research, even if the whole apparatus is ultimately in service of entertainment rather than argument.

Where the book falls short is in its handling of the questions it most wants to pose. The nature-versus-nurture debate is resolved too tidily: Josh is good because he does the opposite of his father, and the discredited psychologist was wrong, and Tyler vouches for him, and the cat likes him—Fred, the long-haired black-and-white rescue who “hates men” yet purrs in Josh’s lap, functions repeatedly as an animal moral barometer whose verdict the human characters can’t trust themselves to make. The book assembles an overwhelming case for Josh’s fundamental decency and then treats the case as closed. But the most unnerving moment in the novel is not any of the kink scenes or the accidental killing; it’s when Aly discovers Bluhm is dead and wonders, “Had some subconscious part of me acted on impulse?” The question is never answered, and the novel moves past it quickly, absorbed by the logistics of body disposal and mob dinners. That unanswered question is the book’s real subject, and I wish Allen had let it linger. The possibility that Josh’s “accidental” asphyxiation of a rapist might not have been fully accidental, that the inherited darkness might have found an outlet disguised as a mistake, is more interesting than the vindication the novel ultimately offers. Lights Out wants to argue that identity is chosen, not inherited, and that the performance of monstrosity can be a way of exorcising it. It largely succeeds at making that argument feel emotionally true for its characters. But it doesn’t fully trust the darkness it has summoned, and the epilogue’s domestic-comedy coda—the cats have toilet-papered the Airbnb, the inherited horror is now just chaotic domestic mayhem—feels like a retreat from implications the novel was braver to raise than to face.

This is a book for readers who want their romance with a pulse of genuine menace and their ethical questions entertained rather than settled. Readers who find the very premise of stalking-as-courtship irredeemable should stay away; the novel does not apologize for its central relationship so much as it invites you to find it hot, and if you don’t, there’s no secondary entrance. But readers willing to accept the book on its own terms will find a structurally clever, tonally audacious piece of genre fiction that takes trauma seriously, writes explicit sex as emotional processing, and generates real suspense from the question of whether two damaged people can build something sturdy out of the materials that broke them. The prose is competent and occasionally sharp—the opening image of a sunrise as a “bruise-to-blood ombré” efficiently establishes Aly’s perceptual world—and the comic voice lands more often than it misses, especially in the banter between the leads. Where the novel is genuinely distinctive is in its willingness to let kink be both genuinely dangerous and genuinely therapeutic, and to insist that consent negotiated in fantasy doesn’t automatically translate into real-world safety, even if it produces real-world healing. That’s a more honest position than most dark romance is willing to take, and it’s why Lights Out, for all its compromises and evasions, deserves to be read as something more than a provocation dressed in rom-com clothes.