Lights Out

“Even mirrors were a problem nowadays because I couldn’t look at one without picturing my own face contorted in rage as fists rained down on me. I’d seen other documentaries about violent men, and it always baffled me when their family members swore they had no idea what their father/husband/uncle had been doing in their free time.”

Josh is consumed by the fear that he will become his father, but this fear is compounded with the memory of the trauma he faced from his father’s abuse. When Josh says that he does not understand how other families of serial killers claim not to have known about the crimes, he is not criticizing them. Rather, he is lamenting how he cannot avoid his knowledge of his father’s crimes, feeling more jealous of the ignorant families than scornful.

“Living alone in a big city and seeing the worst of what it could do to women on a nightly basis made me paranoid. I had a gun in my car and one more besides the one I now held hidden nearby. I slept with a baseball bat beside my bed and mace and throwing knives on my nightstand within easy reach. Two days a week, I took a hand-to-hand combat course taught by an ex-marine who didn’t go easy on me because I was the only woman in his class. If someone else was in my house right now, they’d be leaving it in a body bag.”

A critical difference between Aly and most feminine protagonists in dark romance is her affinity for self-defense. She does not see herself as a victim, and she takes precautions to defend herself. Crucially, she also has an anger or animosity that fuels her, making it seem as though she actually wants to be attacked as an excuse to use her skills against her attacker. This feeling arises specifically with Brad, whom Aly wants to hurt when she knows that an attack from him would justify her deployment of violence.

“Not that I had anything against meeker women; they just weren’t for me. In fact, they downright terrified me because they’d been Dad’s preferred prey. I’d never even dated one, let alone slept with one, on the off chance that I shared his proclivities. I stuck to strong, borderline-aggressive women instead. Ones who had a better chance of fighting me off if I ever…well, I’d rather not think about that while Aly still filled my computer screen.”

Josh’s personal preferences in dating are impacted by his father’s crimes, but his reasoning provides insight into Josh’s personality. He is not asserting that he does not like meek women, instead asserting that they would have less ability to defend themselves if Josh attacked them. While Josh is aroused by the idea of conflict, he prefers women like Aly because they are more likely to succeed in stopping Josh from going too far with his violence. Josh also implies that he enjoys being dominated, as well, hinting at the way he wants to share power with Aly.

“He’d probably be even more convinced that I approved of what he’d done and was hopeful for a repeat, preferably while I was home. I scooped my phone off the dresser and froze. Was I hopeful for a repeat? I shook my head. No. Absolutely not. That would be crazy, right? But there was no denying the heat blooming in my core or how my heart tripped in response to the thought.”

Aly’s uncertainty is a staple of the dark romance genre, as she works through her conflicting feelings about Josh’s testing of her boundaries. Josh broke into her home, and the fantasy they share is remarkably similar to sexual assault. Aly’s conflict is between her sense of what is “normal,” which would be feeling fear and anger, and her true feelings of attraction and arousal. This demonstrates The Moral Complexities of Control, Consent, and Power Dynamics, wherein Aly is forced for the first time to evaluate the impact and nuances of the dangerous, non-consensual scenario she has abstractly fantasized about for so long.

“Lastly, because some small part of me believed in fairness and wanted to even the playing field, I got her a high-tech camera detector. Watching her had been fun and was fulfilling a surveillance kink I didn’t even know I had until now, but it’d be even more fun if Aly decided she wanted to be watched.”

Josh again displays his desire to balance the power dynamic between him and Aly, refusing to continue monitoring her without her knowledge or consent. What is most revealing about their dynamic is Josh’s assertion that Aly might decide that she wants to be watched. Ultimately, Aly does plug the camera in of her own volition, and both she and Josh claim that they did not know about these fetishes ahead of time. This demonstrates how sexual interests are not fixed and can change within a relationship, a fact that impacts both characters’ development throughout the story.

“I dropped my gaze back down and read a few more comments defending his nonexistent honor before my anger got the better of me, and I typed, When she has good reason to be mad at you, did you mean to say? I had barely hit enter when my phone pinged. He’d already seen and liked my comment. Oh, fuck. He never liked comments. Would people notice? Another notification popped up. User the.faceless.man has started following you. I nearly dropped my phone. No, he didn’t.”

Aly and Josh’s online interactions introduce The Interplay Between Fantasy, Obsession, and Reality, opening a discussion of social media and the way viewers form parasocial bonds with content creators. Aly knows that Josh’s followers are obsessed with him in the same way she was, which is shown by how they instinctually defend him without knowing that he committed crimes against Aly. They further this by responding with intense jealousy when Josh shows any favor toward Aly. Even though a like and a follow seem like good things, Aly knows that they also make her a target online, and she later comments that other followers of Josh’s account messaged her following his actions.

“I nodded. For whatever reason, empathy was starting to come easy for me with her. Watching her through the hospital cameras showed me a woman who would do anything to help others, even to the detriment of herself. I figured she must have been sore after being on her feet for so long, and even though the orthopedic shoes she wore looked comfortable, I was betting her legs and back still hurt.”

Josh is constantly evaluating his frame of mind to check for signs that he might be like his father. Aly is an instant reassurance that he is not because he cares about her well-being more than he wants to have sex with her. In this passage, Josh shows how comforted he is by the fact that he wants to care for Aly, and his empathy for her situation makes him both a good partner and a good person, unlike his father.

“Whenever I daydreamed, it was always of some brooding alpha male pushing me around, aggressive and borderline ruthless as he used my body. I still wanted that for myself at some point, wanted it with this man in particular, but I doubted I’d get it after what I’d done to him, regardless of how nice he was being about it.”

Aly reveals the root of her sexual fantasies, which all stem from a desire to be dominated. However, Aly is inconsistent with her desire for submission, as she also has the capacity to be forward and forceful. This is shown in her decision to perform oral sex on Josh in the car at knifepoint, thus subverting both Aly’s typical fantasies and tropes within the dark romance genre. In this moment, she is not worried that Josh will be too forceful but that he will be driven away by her own forcefulness.

“I dropped my focus to the floor and searched for anything I missed while cleaning earlier. Tyler liked to leave his socks lying around, but he’d been doing it less and less. He complained the other day that he was running out of them and the dryer must be eating them somehow. It wasn’t. I was throwing them away to try and break his bad habit.”

Though this passage seems innocuous, it establishes a pattern in Josh’s behavior. Rather than addressing issues directly, he prefers to manipulate others in subtle ways that encourage them to change their behavior. He does this for the person’s benefit, such as helping Tyler keep the apartment clean, but the tactic reveals how Josh perceives others. While he loves and respects Tyler, he still sees Tyler as a malleable presence, susceptible to covert actions and manipulation. This relates to how he initially interacts with Aly from a distance, showing his interest in a non-confrontational and detached way that protects him from the tension of in-person interactions.

“What would I realistically do if I opened my bedroom door and found the Faceless Man waiting on the other side, shirtless and covered in fake blood like he’d stepped out of one of his videos? Probably say, ‘Smash,’ and then pounce. These masked thirst trappers had no idea how feral they made people. Sure, our comments might give them some indication, but they probably thought we were all talk. We weren’t. By the time I was finished with the Faceless Man tonight, he would be the one walking funny.”

Reflecting the parasocial dynamics of social media, Aly confronts her own passion for Josh. She acknowledges that she and other viewers are irrationally obsessed with Josh as a content creator, rather than as a real person, and she notes how Josh and other creators likely do not know the influence they have on others. As with her other conflicting desires, Aly reveals here how her sexual desires are violent and acknowledges that Josh would be surprised to find out what she and other viewers want to do to his body. This trend contributes to the overarching issue of how people objectify and dehumanize content creators, much in the way Josh is afraid of doing to Aly.

“I let out a relieved breath, glad to return to safer, more antagonistic ground. Not that I didn’t want to fuck Aly—standing up, sitting down, sideways, backward, against a wall—but something was holding me back besides her need for sleep and recovery. It felt almost wrong to have sex with her before she knew the whole truth about me. Not just who I was but where I came from.”

As with the issue of tiredness, aches, and sleep, Josh adds another component to his reserve with Aly. He does not want to push past the boundary of their fantasies into what he considers legitimate sex, namely vaginal penetration, until Aly knows who he is. Though this line is seemingly arbitrary, it plays into the heteronormative assumption that vaginal intercourse between a man and a woman is the only “real” sex. At the same time, Josh’s decision shows a distinct respect for Aly, who likely holds the same belief in what constitutes “real” sex.

“If my disappointment at getting home yesterday and not finding him there was anything to go by, this man had the potential to hurt my feelings. I blamed all the time I’d spent obsessing over his videos. It made it feel like he’d been a part of my life for much longer than he actually had, like we’d been in a strange, one-sided sexual relationship since before Halloween.”

The one-sided relationship that Aly describes is precisely the parasocial attachment that develops the theme of the interplay between fantasy, obsession, and reality. Her feeling that she has been in a relationship with Josh for longer than they have known each other fits within that trend. Josh isn’t responsible for the attachment she developed to him online, but his actual involvement with her has advanced her feelings of intimacy and introduced stakes to the relationship. Aly, who has been emotionally cut off from others until this point, is facing the real possibility of experiencing abandonment or romantic disappointment.

“Everything clicked into place. Aly couldn’t save her mother, so now she spent every waking hour of her life trying to save everyone else, to the detriment of her own mental and physical health. It made me even more protective of her. Someone so unselfish and caring should be safeguarded at all costs, even from themselves, if necessary.”

Josh realizes two elements of his feelings for Aly, each falling under the umbrella of empathy. He understands how Aly’s need to be useful and helpful at work reflects her prior trauma, but he also realizes the distinction in Aly’s desires between wanting to be dominated and needing support. Josh wants to fulfill both functions, both giving her an outlet for her desire for sexual submission and providing a helping hand as she works through her trauma. Part of this decision, though, involves taking more control away from Aly, which will be balanced by Aly’s decision to take control of Josh’s obsessive fear of becoming his father.

“And what had I tried to do? Push him away. Why did I think I didn’t get to have good things? Was it because so much had been taken from me at too young an age, Dad passing from a heart attack only months after Mom died in the crash? Was that when I’d stopped letting people in and started pushing them away, only proving to myself that everyone would eventually leave me?”

This passage includes one of Aly’s few references to her father, who died shortly after her mother, and relates to The Psychological Impact of Trauma on Desire. There are implications that her negative experiences may have influenced and expanded her sexual fantasies, but they also severely limit her capacity to form romantic relationships. She sees herself pushing people away, which contrasts her initial perception of her isolation as an inevitable part of working in healthcare. Additionally, seeing her parents’ deaths as a form of abandonment contributes to her pressing need to stay behind with Josh when he’s in distress and accompany him as often as possible.

“I was dreading that conversation. Aly had already forgiven me for so much, put up with so much. How could I possibly ask her to continue trusting me after she found out who my dad was and started questioning why the son of a notorious serial killer would cover himself in blood and film knife-wielding thirst traps? She’d probably assume I idolized him when nothing could be further from the truth.”

When Aly discovers the truth of Josh’s identity, Josh assumes that she will react like any other random person might, failing to acknowledge how Aly has come to know, trust, and love him thus far. Even with Aly’s approval, he is still haunted by the fear of others abandoning him without giving him a chance to explain himself. This also reflects the psychological impact of trauma on desire, as Josh assumes that anyone would perceive his sexual interests and “thirst traps” as indicative of who he is as a person—in this case, an indication of the similarities between him and his father. Aly’s forgiving reaction shows that connections between trauma and sexual fantasies, while present, don’t reflect the totality of who a person is.

“I’d seen shitty people in his comments say things about how men like him were all butterfaces, and that’s why they wore masks, but that wasn’t true of Josh, and I’d watched enough face-reveal videos from other creators to know those commenters were wrong. So what drove the masktokers to it? Was it the anonymity? The opportunity to don an alter-ego like a second skin and become someone else entirely?”

Aly hints at two critical components to Josh’s mask videos, as well as to Aly and other viewers’ obsession with “MaskTokers.” First, the viewers tend to criticize and judge the creators, even as they praise and follow them, revealing how the parasocial relationship between viewer and creator is tenuous even at the best of times. Second, Aly’s questioning of why Josh wears a mask in his videos opens a discussion of the reasoning behind other creators’ decisions as well, and Aly speculates that Josh enjoys the idea of taking on another persona. This is at least partially accurate and alludes to the separation of a person’s sexual interests and genuine personality.

“Josh and I were alike in so many ways, and the more I learned about his past, the more I was beginning to see that. Things were clicking into place about why Josh was the way he was and why he’d started his social media account. […] if there was anything I could do to set his mind at ease once and for all, I would do it.”

In the same way that Josh uncovers Aly’s trauma and need for support over the course of the novel, Aly learns how Josh’s trauma contributed to his desire for an intimate, vulnerable relationship. Aly’s hope is that she can help Josh see himself the way she sees him, and she knows that his deepest fear is to become his father. As much as Aly hates men like Josh’s father, her insistence that Josh is different serves to highlight the strength of the trust they have built in a short time.

“And no, it wasn’t because meeting the right person at the right time had magically healed me. I’d been warming up to the idea for a while. Aly was simply the final hurdle. She’d let herself be vulnerable with me, and instead of taking advantage of that and harming her, all I wanted to do was cherish her instead. It was time to accept it once and for all: I was nothing like my father, at least not where it mattered most.”

Allen steps in to clarify an element of the text through Josh’s thoughts here. In many works, a character dealing with intense mental health struggles will encounter a romance that seems to instantly improve their mental health. In real life, mental health does not function in this way, and masking a mental health issue with romance is often unhealthy. Knowing this, Allen corrects the situation, explaining that many additional steps were needed before Josh could heal and that Aly is only one component in his journey to recovery.

“The thought should have freaked me out. We’d just become official. It was way too soon to start thinking about what our kids might look like, and I didn’t even know if I wanted kids. But I wasn’t joking when I told Josh that he’d be the one with the stalker if he tried to end things. My obsession with him was growing to worrying levels. Like, I suddenly understood why he watched me at work because if I had his hacking skills, there was a hundred percent chance that I’d return the favor.”

Continuing the theme of balancing power, Aly realizes that she would also assert the same level of control over Josh through technology if she had the ability. Her obsession clouds her ability to judge her own feelings for Josh, though, and she worries if moving forward with the relationship is reasonable and healthy. However, her unhealthy desire to be with Josh is quickly merging with her healthy attraction and intimacy with him, gradually reducing the ambiguity in the interplay between fantasy, obsession, and reality.

“You think I would have learned after the first breach of trust, but nooo, I just had to do it a second time. Honestly, I couldn’t even blame Josh for being angry about that. Trust was the foundation of any good relationship, and I’d drilled holes in ours right after it had been laid. Maybe I could find some way to make it better by apologizing. By telling him I wouldn’t do it again. But, god help me, a large part of me was too excited by the idea of him punishing me to say anything.”

Aly’s internal commentary on trust is only partly in earnest, as she also realizes that Josh is not serious about being angry with her. This passage highlights how Aly and Josh’s sexual games bleed over into their actual relationship, much like how they often ask each other if they are okay during rough sex. On one hand, Aly knows that Josh is not truly upset; on the other, she knows that pretending that he is will be an exciting component to their sex life. This is another example where Allen asserts the level of agency that both Aly and Josh have over their sexual and romantic dynamic.

“I wasn’t trying to sacrifice myself for you, and the last thing I think you are is a damsel in distress. I just want to keep you safe. And I’m sorry if I’m overbearing about it, but I care about you, Aly. […] We’ll both do anything to keep each other safe, even if that means pissing the other one off.”

In a culmination of Josh and Aly’s attempts to balance the power in their relationship, they settle on the fact that they both need love and support and want to provide it to each other. This passage highlights the foundation of their happy relationship, which is grounded in mutual love and respect. Their balance in power within their relationship is reaffirmed, as Josh refuses to imply that Aly needs his help because she is a woman. Neither of them is trying to force the other to do anything, but they both decide that they want to risk themselves for each other, even if they do not think the other person truly needs help.

“So far, we’d only briefly talked about our shared bedroom fantasies, but we hadn’t gotten around to outlining just how far each of us was willing to take them, and the realization that he and I might have very different stopping points suddenly made me nervous. No safe words, I reminded myself. If he pushed me too far, I could simply tell him to stop. After everything we’d been through, I trusted him enough to keep his word that he would.”

Aly reveals a critical component of dark romance and dubious consent narratives. Though they are dating and trust one another, there is always a possible gap between the fantasies of two characters. Though Aly cites the possibility that sufficient discussion can cover these gaps, the fundamental concept of dubious consent will always have an element of danger since Josh or Aly could easily take a sex act too far and potentially violate the other partner’s desires. The author asserts that the moral complexities of control, consent, and power dynamics are primarily handled through trust and communication.

“Then I turned my attention back to Nico and did something I hadn’t done in years. I went to that cold, dark place in my head where I used to hide when Dad was at his worst. There was no pain inside it, no emotion. I didn’t give a fuck about anyone or anything there, not even myself, and I knew it showed on my face because this was the same place I’d gone to all those years ago when I scared off Tyler’s shitty ex.”

Josh’s use of his “cold, dark place,” which used to be a retreat from his father’s abuse, shows how much Josh has grown relative to his trauma during his relationship with Aly. He is now comfortable harnessing this tactic without fear of becoming like his father or regressing to a traumatic place. He points back to his interaction with Tyler’s ex, in which he scared himself with his darkness, but he now feels confident and capable.