Author: Navessa Allen
Genre: Dark Romance
Kindle Unlimited: No
Published: August 2024
Publisher: Zando--Slowburn
Series: Into Darkness #1
Synopsis: {via Amazon]
The viral TikTok stalker dark romance, burning with high heat, hilarious banter, and a love story like you’ve never seen before. Can you handle the ride?
I want someone with a soul as black as night. Someone who would burn the world down for me and not lose a single minute of sleep over it.
Trauma nurse Aly Cappellucci doesn’t need any more kinks. She likes the one she’s landed on just fine. To her, nothing could top the masked men she follows online. Unless one of those men was shirtless, heavily tattooed, and waiting for her in her bedroom. She dreams about being hunted by one in particular, of him chasing her down and doing deliciously dark things to her willing body. She never could have guessed that by sending one drunken text, those dreams would become her new reality.
I want things most people don’t, craving darkness and depravity instead of light and love.
Josh Hammond has spent his life avoiding the limelight, but his online persona is another story. At night, he posts masked thirst traps for his millions of fans to drool over, but one follower has caught his eye: Aly. After reading a comment begging him to break into her house wearing a mask, he decides to take her up on her offer.
Together, Aly and Josh live out their darkest fantasies, unaware that Aly has captured the attention of someone else. Someone with far more sinister intentions than a little light stalking. As Josh turns from predator to protector and the stakes heighten, he must ask himself how far he’s willing to go for the woman he’s obsessed with.
Lights Out is a fast-paced dark romance with a morally gray male lead. Some themes and scenes may be disturbing to readers. Please check the TWs at the beginning of the book.
Review:
*May include spoilers*
I really enjoyed this book. With that said, I'm not sure what I expected from the book. It got such good reviews all around, I think I expected something shocking or spectacular. While it was a good book, I wouldn't call it spectacular and perhaps that's on me because my hopes were way up after all the booktok reviewers said things like: "I wasn't prepared." The plot includes mask kink, stalking, accidental murder, and the mob. There's a lot going on here and there are places where it's slow or drags. Still, I would recommend it, if for no other reason than that I loved Josh. He's as close to being everything as any book boyfriend I've had in a long time.
The Characters:
Josh and Aly both come complete with background quirks that make them interesting characters. Josh has a deep, dark family secret while Aly carries guilt over something that happened in her past. They have baggage, like everyone else, but where they diverge from normalcy is in their actions. Both of them have dark thoughts and both of them are willing to act on those dark thoughts. They both accept things most people wouldn't, like stalking/being stalked. They share some unusual kinks and come together to commit an accidental crime, which they're both a little bit disturbed by but seem to get over it pretty quickly.
Josh, the MMC, is quirky. He's warm when he needs to be and dark when it's called for. Josh is a hacker with a compulsive need to watch those he cares about and a pretty strange social media pass time. Even though he stalks Aly, he doesn't mean her any harm, which is something he seems to have trouble differentiating. Stalking is usually bad behavior, but inside this book's confines, Josh's stalking Aly isn't so much bad behavior as it is simply compulsive behavior.
Aly, the FMC, is a nurse with a compulsive need to help everyone. Unlike Josh, she's not so much quirky as she is unphased by a lot of the darker things happening in this book. She learns she's being stalked and while she has a momentary freak out, she's not phased by being stalked. They commit an accidental crime and Aly is nearly unmoved by the situation.
Together, they're a solidly matched pair.
The Plot:
Aly and Josh meet online, through their shared social media kink, and soon come together to wreak a little unintended havoc when a bad, bad man breaks into Aly's house with the intention of raping and killing her. When all hell breaks lose, they turn to her family for help but that's not without it's pitfalls as they need Josh's hacking skills to help clean up the mess.
I feel like the beginning of this book is a slow burn. While there are some semi-sexual scenes early on, the characters spend almost half the book really getting together and there is a lot of discussion about the Faceless Man and whether or not she knows who he is. The plot with the bad guy breaking in to Aly's house comes relatively late in the book. It seemed to take a long time to get to the point and then the end drags on for what feels like forever. However, as mentioned above I still enjoyed the book overall and would definitely recommend it for those who enjoy dark romance.
Rating:
❤❤❤❤ - Delightful. I enjoyed it and would recommend it. I probably won't read book two, but book one was a fun read.
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