Book Review: Lights Out By Navessa Allen
Lights Out By Navessa Allen
Lights Out by Navessa Allen - Book 1 Into Darkness Series
Tropes:
Stalker Romance, Masked MMC, Morally Grey, He Falls First, Primal Play, Knife Play, Fear Play, CNC, Black Cat x Golden Retriever, Social Media, Predator to Protector
Summary:
Lights Out by Navessa Allen is the viral TikTok dark romance that turned BookTok upside down and for good reason. Trauma nurse Aly Cappellucci has a type: masked men, dark fantasies, and the kind of desire she'd never say out loud. Her guilty obsession? The Faceless Man - a heavily tattooed, ghost-masked stranger who posts thirst traps online to millions of followers. One drunken text later, her fantasy becomes terrifyingly, exhilaratingly real.
Josh Hammond is not who he seems. Behind the mask is a cybersecurity expert carrying the weight of a notorious legacy, the son of a serial killer who has spent his life trying to outrun his own darkness. When Aly's comment catches his eye, he can't look away. So he does the only logical thing: he tracks her down, breaks into her house, and becomes exactly what she asked for.
But what begins as a consensual game of predator and prey turns dangerous when someone else sets their sights on Aly. As Josh shifts from stalker to protector, the stakes become very, very real.
🤍 BOOK REVIEW
Dark. Chaotic. Completely, embarrassingly unputdownable.
Lights Out isn't your standard dark romance. It's something weirder, wilder, and somehow more addictive than it has any right to be and I mean that as the highest possible compliment.
Aly is everything I didn't know I needed in a female lead. She's overworked, emotionally switched off, and deeply, unapologetically into her own darkness. She doesn't stumble into this fantasy, she asks for it. Out loud. On the internet. And that boldness is what makes her so compelling. She's not a passive participant in her own story. She's chaotic and a little reckless, but she meets Josh exactly where he is, and it works.
And then there's Josh. God, Josh. A man who moonlights as a masked internet thirst trap and genuinely believes he's destined to become his serial killer father. His whole arc is the push and pull between the darkness he fears inside himself and the very specific, feral way he chooses to channel it, which is naturally, by breaking into a woman's house because she asked nicely. The internal conflict of wanting to protect someone while also being the most dangerous thing in the room? Devastating. In the best way.
What surprised me most was the humour. This book is genuinely funny. Dark and filthy and terrifying in moments, yes — but also laugh-out-loud absurd in a way that makes the scarier parts hit harder by contrast. The banter between Aly and Josh crackles. The cat named Fred is iconic. The whole thing has this unhinged energy that I could not get enough of.
Is it dark? Yes. Is it morally grey to its core? Absolutely. Does it blur every line between fantasy, consent, and chaos? That's the whole point. Navessa Allen isn't interested in making you comfortable, she's interested in making you unable to stop reading. Mission very much accomplished.
"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."
Lights Out is the kind of book that makes you want to lock your windows… and then immediately hope someone ignores that. Compulsive, chaotic, and laced with dark humour, it's the perfect read for anyone who likes their romance morally questionable, their MMC heavily tattooed, and their tension absolutely suffocating. If you've been curious about the dark romance genre and want a way in that's as fun as it is filthy, this is it.
Browse Lights Out here
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Browse Dark Romance here
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