The Setup
This is the full plot of Lights Out by Navessa Allen, with spoilers all the way through, so if you haven’t read it, watch the review instead. Everything here comes from the book text, with chapter numbers so you can check me.
It’s a dark stalker romance, and it carries heavy content: explicit sex, stalking, a home invasion and violent death. I’ll keep the retelling plain and leave out the explicit detail.
The book has twenty-six chapters and an epilogue. They alternate between two narrators. The odd chapters are Aly, and the even chapters are Josh.
Chapters One to Three
Chapter One is Aly. She is an emergency room nurse at an inner city trauma hospital, so overworked that she has lost track of her love life. After a long shift she realizes she hasn’t seen her casual hookup, Tyler, in two months. She has a new kink: masked men, and one anonymous creator in particular, whom fans call the Faceless Man. She texts Tyler a screenshot of his video and asks him to come over wearing a mask. Tyler says no, and says he’s seeing someone.
Chapter Two is Josh, Tyler’s roommate. Tyler hands him the phone, and Josh freezes, because the shirtless man in the screenshot is him. The tattoos are his. He is the Faceless Man. He deletes the text and plays it cool. He also admits, in his own head, that he already knew Aly’s address, her schedule and her grades. He decides to break into her house, film a video on her bed, and install a camera to see whether she really wants what her comments say.
Chapter Three is Aly at work. It’s a strange, busy night, and she can’t stop watching his newest video. Then she gets home and finds his mask on her bed. The video was filmed in her own bedroom.
Chapters Four to Seven
In Chapter Four, Josh watches her through the camera he hid in her room. She grabs a gun and searches the house. He decides she is only a tourist, and starts planning his exit. Then, instead, he watches her message him back, and he cannot make himself leave. He sends her a video. She responds the way he’d hoped. He stops watching at the last moment, and he knows he is already in too deep.
Chapter Five is Aly, torn between fear and arousal. She decides she needs help finding him, and the person she picks is Tyler’s roommate Josh, because he is clearly good with computers. She doesn’t know it is him.
Chapter Six is Josh. He hacks her laptop to follow her research, and he is also frightened that he might be like his father, a violent man who is the subject of true crime podcasts. Aly finds the hidden camera, and he messages her that he stopped watching. She doesn’t believe him.
Chapter Seven is Aly. A mass shooting sends a flood of patients to her hospital. After a hard night, she finds the Faceless Man waiting outside in a car. He texts her instead of speaking. She gets in, gun in hand.
Chapters Eight to Twelve
Chapter Eight is the car ride. Aly lets him drive her car, and a sexual encounter in the car ends with her accidentally stabbing his hand with a knife she was holding. In Chapter Nine she stitches the wound at her kitchen table, which is illegal for a nurse in her state, and asks him not to tell. He mimes a zipped mouth. She also texts Josh, Tyler’s roommate, and sets up a visit.
Chapter Ten is Josh, and a lot of backstory. His roommate Tyler screens his dates so that nobody with true crime obsession meets Josh. Josh also remembers Tyler’s college girlfriend, Cara McKinley, whom Josh saw as an abuser, and how he took matters into his own hands to protect his friend.
In Chapter Eleven, Aly visits Josh. She is nearly sure he is the Faceless Man. He wears gloves, so she squeezes his hand, and he doesn’t flinch. Later the masked man shows up at her house. They play out a long scene with no safe words, only a promise that she can say stop.
Chapter Twelve is Josh in the morning. He cooks breakfast and feeds her cat, Fred. She stays suspicious, and tells him that she’s going to compare his DNA to the bandages in her freezer. He has already planned for that, and used Tyler’s sweatshirt.
Chapters Thirteen to Sixteen
Chapter Thirteen is Aly’s lowest point. She brings her samples to a friend in the forensic lab, Vern. Then a man named Bradley Bluhm arrives in her emergency room, and he is a man she knows was accused of raping a drugged woman. He gloats that he will walk free. A car accident victim who reminds her of her mother, who died when Aly was sixteen, breaks her.
Chapter Fourteen is Josh, who watches Brad on the hospital cameras and decides Brad has to die. Then he arrives at Aly’s house, and the chapter ends with him driving a knife into her mattress and telling her to come closer. In Chapter Fifteen, that scene plays out from her side. Afterward she thinks about how he held her while she cried, and he has ordered her a larger bed.
Chapter Sixteen is the turning point. Josh and Aly are in her bed when an alarm tells him that her back door camera is covered. Someone is trying to break in. It is Brad, who has been stalking Aly. Josh goes out with her gun. In the struggle he tapes Brad’s mouth and nose, and Brad suffocates. Aly checks his pulse and tells Josh, gently, that Brad is dead. Josh throws up. Aly, who has seen death every week, jokes about it.
Chapters Seventeen to Nineteen
Chapter Seventeen is a drive through the night with the body in the trunk. Aly tells Josh it was an accident, and that the world is better without Brad. Josh takes off his mask. She also says she knew who he was. He asks her to be his girlfriend, and she says yes.
In Chapter Eighteen they take the body to her uncle’s house. Her uncle Nico is a mob boss, and Aly’s father once told her to go to him if she was in trouble. Her cousins Greg and Junior take control. Josh stays behind, and is taken in a van to wipe Brad’s computer at his parents’ house. They get there and the police are already outside, so the first attempt is aborted.
Chapter Nineteen is Aly. She gets her car cleaned and drives to Josh’s apartment with Fred. Josh comes back unharmed.
Chapters Twenty to Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty is Josh in his apartment with Aly. He scolds her for leaving the bedroom, and promises a punishment. Chapter Twenty-One is Aly, sore and happy, until Junior explains the plan for a second attempt at Brad’s house. The crew will go in as power company workers, and Josh and Aly are going along.
In Chapter Twenty-Two, the crew goes in. Josh gets to Brad’s computer, and the house holds a terrible secret: two bodies in the basement. Brad’s parents arrive, and Josh sets off the house alarm so the police have a legal reason to go inside. In Chapter Twenty-Three, Josh and Aly flee through the snow. He is hurt, but they get out.
Chapters Twenty-Four to Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Four is a warm shower back home. Josh deals with a flashback to his father. Chapter Twenty-Five is Aly, who wakes up tied to her bed, with the Faceless Man in the room. It is the punishment he promised. It ends with the two of them saying they are falling for each other.
Chapter Twenty-Six is three weeks later. They have dinner with Nico’s family. Brad is all over the news. The police found the two bodies. A man who looks like Brad was caught on camera near the Canadian border. Nico’s cleanup worked: the police think Brad himself, and an accomplice, were in the study that night. Josh tells Aly he loves her, and she says she knew.
Epilogue
The epilogue is midsummer, at a rented cabin. Aly runs through the woods, and Josh chases her, a game they planned. After it, they come back to the cabin, and a new kitten called Maud is wrecking the place with Fred. Josh wants a big family. Aly says two kids. It ends on the best day of her life.
Subscribe
If this helped, subscribe, tap like, and tell me in the comments what you want covered next.
