Lights Out

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of sexual content, child abuse, death, and cursing.

“Unlike Brinley, I was single…ish, but even when I had partners, I didn’t talk shop with them. I never dated seriously—I was too career-focused for that right now—and talking about a bad day or how sad it was when I lost a patient felt like the kind of thing you saved for a significant other. […] Civilians, as we called non-healthcare or emergency workers, didn’t get it a lot of the time.”

Aly’s description of her working life paints a picture of an isolated character. Though she identifies this isolation as something she chose, she understands how she is limited in her outlets to therapists and coworkers. The reference to non-medical personnel as “civilians” evokes military lingo, emphasizing the distressing situations that emergency room workers must witness and work through. “Civilians” do not understand the struggle of her traumatic job, so she does not feel like she can adequately confide in them. Without being able to share her trauma, she bears the weight of it alone.

“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.