Rating: ★★★★☆
Genre: Dark Romance (Lite) / Rom-Com
Available On: Amazon

My journey with Dark Romance began last year and has rapidly become an obsession. This year, I started out strong with Lights Out. I’d seen so much hype on TikTok over this it went straight onto my TBR, but because I developed a bit of a DR kink last year, it had a lot of competition, and I only just got to it.

For anyone coming into this cold, Lights Out is a contemporary dark romance that plays with the line between fantasy and reality.

Aly is a trauma nurse who unwinds by doom-scrolling masked, anonymous thirst traps online. One particular masked man catches her attention, and a combination of curiosity, alcohol, and poor decision-making leads her to engage with him directly. What starts as online fascination escalates when that fantasy steps into her real life.

That masked man is Josh. He’s meticulous, intensely controlled, deeply self-aware, and very comfortable operating in moral grey zones. Their connection is built around shared kink, fear play, and consent-heavy power exchange, with Josh orchestrating scenarios designed to frighten and arouse Aly in equal measure.

There is an external threat hovering at the edges of the story, involving violent men and criminal activity, but the book’s primary focus is the relationship itself: the dynamic between Aly and Josh, their banter, their escalating sexual encounters, and the negotiation of boundaries as fantasy becomes something tangible and ongoing.

If you’re expecting a plot-driven stalker thriller, this isn’t that. The relationship is the story.

Lights Out Is Dark Romance (Lite)

I think I read dark romance in the wrong order.

I started with Haunting Adeline and Hunting Adeline, not because I thought I’d enjoy them, but because I was so fucking curious. BookTok. Bookstagram. The sheer volume of noise around them. I had to know.

And honestly? That was diving straight in at the deep end.

I had mixed feelings about Haunting Adeline, but Hunting Adeline completely recontextualised everything for me. By the end of that second book, I was hooked on the genre. One of my favourite reads of 2025 was the Mindf*ck series, and since then I’ve been devouring dark romance at a frankly impressive rate.

Which brings me to Lights Out. My first dark romance read of 2026.

I enjoyed it. Genuinely. But I also can’t escape the feeling that I would have liked it a lot more if I hadn’t already read far more intense books first.

Because Lights Out is dark romance lite.

On paper, it ticks all the boxes.

Stalker romance. Obsession. An MMC who breaks into the FMC’s house. Rough, fear-inducing, kink-heavy sex. Violence. Questionable morals. A rapist. A murderer. Even a mafia-adjacent subplot lurking in the background.

Everything seems to be in place.

And yet.

Let’s Talk About Josh

Josh is endlessly entertaining. Super hot. Has a mask kink. Is fastidious about social media practices and filming techniques. An expert hacker. Genuinely hilarious. The son of a serial killer. Hung like a small horse.

What more could a girl want in a dark romance MMC?

Well… darkness, actually.

Do not get me wrong, I loved Josh. He’s a great character. Despite there being pretty much zero plot, he actually manages a decent development arc. He has depth. Growth. Self-awareness. Internal conflict. He worries about what he might be capable of. He thinks about doing dark things. He fears enjoying them.

But if you put him next to someone like Zade Meadows, the difference becomes painfully obvious.

Zade is dark. Genuinely, terrifyingly dark. So dark you cannot fathom how Adeline survives him until Hunting Adeline reframes everything and you realise just how much of her resistance was play. Even then, Zade never knew that for sure. He assumed. He took. He decided he would bend her eventually.

That’s dark romance.

Josh, by contrast, is… kind.

In his own way, yes, but still. He’s thoughtful. Soft. Caring. Protective. Respectful.

Sure, he breaks into a woman’s house to scare the shit out of her. But only after he’s absolutely certain she genuinely asked for it and is into it.

Which leads to the core dynamic of the book.

No Safe Words (But Actually Very Safe)

One of the central themes of Josh and Aly’s relationship is “no safe words”.

Except this does not mean “I’ll never stop no matter what you say or do”, which is where a lot of dark romance lands.

Here, it means: all you have to say is stop, and I stop.

Josh constantly checks in. He monitors Aly’s reactions. He worries about pushing too far. He actively tries not to cross lines.

So even when we get the kink, the spice, the hardcore scenes, including anal and knife play mashed together, it all feels… soft.

By dark romance standards.

If you’re new to the genre, or unsure whether you’ll like it, this is actually a brilliant entry point. It lets you test the waters without being dragged under.

If you’re already comfortable swimming in the deep end, this is going to feel a bit too bright.

That softness comes partly from how genuinely laugh-out-loud funny the book is, but also from how clearly and carefully the boundaries are drawn. Whatever happens, it’s consensual. It’s controlled. It’s safe. The danger is something they’re both deliberately playing at.

Which is fine. Enjoyable, even.

But it’s not dark.

Enjoyable, But Thin

I did thoroughly enjoy Lights Out. It’s a fun read. A nice change of pace. But I do have two major criticisms.

The first is that there is no real plot.

Like… at all.

The plot is essentially that two people realise they share the same kink and then proceed to have a lot of kinky encounters. Some of the sex scenes are so drawn out that I actually got bored, which is not something I say lightly. There just isn’t much else going on beyond witty banter and increasingly elaborate sex.

When an external plot finally does appear, it barely takes up any space. And unfortunately, it highlights the second issue.

The Problem With Aly

Despite her strengths as a main character, Aly is…annoying.

Worse than that, she’s not worthy of the pedestal Josh puts her on.

You don’t really notice it until later in the book, but she doesn’t actually have much of a personality. Josh does. A well-drawn one. Aly’s entire character is being a nurse and discovering new kinks via the mysterious masked man she obsessed over online until he turned up in her house and started following her around.

When the external plot kicks in, this becomes glaring.

She whines. She complains. She demands immediate explanations despite that actively putting people in danger. She questions every action taken to get her out of a situation she created by needlessly placing herself in danger and then mouthing off for good measure.

Her behaviour directly threatens Josh’s safety and ability to act, even as she convinces herself that she’s protecting him.

In reality, she wastes time he doesn’t have, forces him to worry about her instead of his own situation, and literally tells him to hurry up because she’s cold.

Not even exaggerating.

So the plot is wafer-thin, and the FMC collapses the moment the book tries to do anything outside sex and banter.

Aly As A Powerful FMC (And Why It Matters)

I do want to be fair to Aly, because there is a reason she works for a lot of readers, and why I did enjoy her (despite her annoying me at the end) and class her as a strong FMC.

I love the fact that Aly takes no shit.

She’s a trauma nurse, and while that does overshadow her personality somewhat, that’s actually the point. Aly lost her mother at a young age. She was forced to watch her die after a car crash, unable to help. Becoming a nurse as a way to try and save people is a little cliché, sure, but it’s also psychologically grounded in very real human behaviour.

Her obsessive, borderline compulsive need to be at the hospital, working, helping people, and the fact she sacrifices any semblance of a personal life as a result, makes sense. So does her difficulty forming real attachments outside of work. 

What we’re shown is a woman isolated by trauma, who can only really connect through usefulness. Patients. Colleagues. Crisis.

She has hookups, but they mean so little to her that she doesn’t even notice two months have gone by since she last saw the most recent one. Which, incidentally, turns out to be the roommate of the man behind her favourite masked thirst trap account online. 

That detail alone tells you how compartmentalised her life is.

I class Aly as a strong FMC for multiple reasons.

She’s excellent at her job. She’s fiercely protective of other hospital staff. She takes self-defence classes. She trains. Physically. Properly. Not just ‘pose-ready for social media’ training. She actively works to ensure she can protect herself. She’s self-aware enough to understand why she is the way she is, where her behaviour might be unhealthy. She’s able to question whether what she’s doing with Josh is reasonable, concerning, dangerous, or simply a kink she’s exploring in a relatively controlled way.

She’s fully aware of the potential danger Josh poses. That danger is part of the allure. But instead of sitting around agonising over it, she takes logical steps to gather information. She tries to figure out who he is and whether she actually needs to be worried.

She’s smart. She’s emotionally intelligent. She’s physically capable because of long-term training and deliberate effort, not because the love interest decides to train her and she becomes inexplicably competent overnight. 

Yes, Adeline, I’m looking directly at you. But not just you. It’s a common trope.

And honestly, that matters.

While the dark elements of Lights Out are considerably lighter than many books in the genre, I do think it deserves real credit for creating an FMC who is genuinely powerful in her own right, with full agency over her life, her body, and her choices.

She’s not perfect. She absolutely could have done with more fleshing out beyond these traits. But the traits she does have are, for the most part, very well written.

Which is why it’s such a shame that when the external plot finally arrives, she’s reduced to whining instead of being allowed to remain the capable woman the book itself spent so long establishing.

My annoyance with her came more from that, than the specific things she said and did that were irritating. She should have been better than this. As written. As established, Not ‘it would be nice if she was like that’ but she’s actually been like that right the way through then suddenly became an insufferable princess.

Out of nowhere.

Final Thoughts On Lights Out

Despite all of this, I did love Lights Out. Josh is genuinely enjoyable, funny, thoughtful, and more nuanced than the plot of the book strictly deserves. The humour lands. The chemistry works. I’ll absolutely read the rest of the series with enthusiasm.

My frustration with it came from a lack of development, mainly at the end. The external plot could have been given more weight. Aly’s actions and reactions once it kicked in could have been more firmly grounded in the strong, capable woman the book itself had established her to be.

The spice was clearly given a lot more thought and development than anything else. And while I appreciated the spice, and I’m sure many readers are perfectly happy with that balance, I’m hoping the next book does manage a bit more development in other areas.

This was a great read, very fun, genuinely hilarious at times.

But go into this one clear-eyed.

This is not where you go for darkness or depth. It’s a light-hearted romp that echoes the themes of Haunting and Hunting Adeline in a safe, controlled, almost cosy way.

No safe words.