Lights Out



Smutty Stuff:

Aftercare, Anal, Biting, Blindfold, Consentual Nonconsent, Doggy, Dubcon, Enthusiastic Consent, Fingering, Gentle, Knife Play, Masturbation, Multiple Orgasms, Oral, Orgasm Denial, Primal Play, Restraints, Roleplay, Shower Sex, and Spanking

The viral TikTok stalker dark romance, burning with high heat, hilarious banter, and a love story like you’ve never seen before. Can you handle the ride?

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.

Trauma nurse Aly Cappellucci doesn’t need any more kinks. She likes the one she’s landed on just fine. To her, nothing could top the masked men she follows online. Unless one of those men was shirtless, heavily tattooed, and waiting for her in her bedroom. She dreams about being hunted by one in particular, of him chasing her down and doing deliciously dark things to her willing body. She never could have guessed that by sending one drunken text, those dreams would become her new reality.

I want things most people don’t, craving darkness and depravity instead of light and love.

Josh Hammond has spent his life avoiding the limelight, but his online persona is another story. At night, he posts masked thirst traps for his millions of fans to drool over, but one follower has caught his eye: Aly. After reading a comment begging him to break into her house wearing a mask, he decides to take her up on her offer.

Together, Aly and Josh live out their darkest fantasies, unaware that Aly has captured the attention of someone else. Someone with far more sinister intentions than a little light stalking. As Josh turns from predator to protector and the stakes heighten, he must ask himself how far he’s willing to go for the woman he’s obsessed with.

Lights Out is a fast-paced dark romance with a morally gray male lead. Some themes and scenes may be disturbing to readers. Please check the TWs at the beginning of the book.

Tropes: Stalker romance / Morally grey MMC / Masked stalker / He falls first / Black cat x golden retriever / Kink friendly

Okay.

I liked it, but hear me out, it could be better.

Really, seriously: there was not enough fucking stalking. The windup to full-blown sex was short. FL figured out the dude too quickly. There was not enough fear.

But it was cute! It was cute, and it was funny, which those parts I really liked. But… I don’t know. I’m gonna bullet point things.

  • This book commits the sin of having names that are the same as people I know, which crumples any sexiness into a paper ball and throws it into the corner. Not something on purpose or can be helped.
  • FL was a Strong Independent Woman who Don’t Need No Man.
  • This book… how do I put this. Writing men… I mean, the ML is a charming character. He’s funny, he’s got an enormous penis, and he actively tries his best to respect our FL (with exception to the stalking). He’s constantly hard and ready to go, he literally says “Men are stupid”, and he makes all the “right” choices, FL’s cat the man-hater instantly likes him…
  • Actually everyone was too picture perfect, I guess, and it made them funny but wooden. It reminds me of the Marvel movie thing where everyone has something to say at exactly the right times, and also they’re all traditionally super hot… the characterization was like… there were archetypes to fill first instead of characters.
  • How tf was his best friend so super cool when FL told him about the crimes he committed?
  • The second half of the book was not as great as the first, which is the actual stalker part. The second half is the mob part.
  • All the main and secondary characters are So Smart
  • In all my experience cats can and will elect to piss themselves instead of holding their pee-pee while in the car
  • I thought it was funny that they lamp-shaded potential drama by just having the characters communicate, but at the same time, it felt anti-climactic
  • It wasn’t scary enough or obsessive enough or dark enough for my tastes. Honestly, all the stalking felt almost consensual— or was consensual. It didn’t fill the need. The horror and the romance of a stalker is their obsession and the violence of it. Our ML is just too much of a teddy bear.
  • There is an epilogue where they run into the woods and do some primal play. I don’t know how, but it feels positively vanilla. The best sex scene in the book is when FL fucks the knife.
  • How is everyone so horny constantly? Except that it’s a smut book I guess. Put a dunce hat on me and shame me
  • Yeah I had fun reading this in the end despite everything I said
  • I put the next book on hold because I was intrigued by mobster x onlyfans star.
  • I mean it when the second half kind of had me at “meh” but I powered through it in the end
  • Remy might read this just out of curiosity but I think he would come to the same conclusion of “I would read it but I wouldn’t own it”

discord

Welcome to the Menagerie.

Here is where M logs their media activity. Partly because Goodreads is forgettable and keeping physical logs is harder. Sometimes M writes a lot. Sometimes M doesn’t write enough. It doesn’t matter. This is just a for-fun little blog so that M can remember what they thought about whatever they watched or read or played or. Whatever.


What is M?

I read. Voraciously. I have subscriptions to those book things on digital retailers. I consume books at nearly all hours. The hours I don’t spend reading? I’m writing. I’m drawing. I have a problem. I have a problem in that I love to read things that are in the same vein repeatedly. Book journals don’t work and as much as I text my friends screenshots of book passages, it doesn’t scratch the itch. Now I’m going to be doing… tiny… tiny book reports.


Truck-Kun Kill Count:


Books & Light Novels Read in 2025: 29/50
58%
Comics Read in 2026: 99/200
48%
Physical Owned Books Read: 485/848
57%


Menagerie Categories


Tagged in the Menagerie

Absolute Asshole NPC (104) Accidentally in Charge (53) A Fetish For Suffering (56) Can't Say No (87) Chekov's Gun (53) Childhood Friends (52) Curiosity Fucks You Up (86) Cursed (74) Damsel in Distress (71) Damsel in Distress (subverted) (103) Dangerous Reputation (100) Doting Husband (73) Double Identity (48) Everyone Loves MC (104) Evil Eyes & Big Heart (54) Fan Service (106) Grumpy x Sunshine (56) Hypercompetent MC (79) If You Love Them, Set Them Free (59) I Know a Guy (61) Last Minute Hero (117) Loss of Humanity (58) Main Character Coloring (85) MC's Skewed Metrics (81) Mean Boy (131) Mean Boy Love Interest (50) Modern Morals (55) Nat 20s (103) Not Actually Dead (90) Nuclear Revenge (78) OP Protag (98) Power of Friendship (87) Power of Love (78) Self-Sacrifice (76) Shock Value (51) Sympathetic Evil (72) The Moral is Community (69) Tragic Backstory (91) Twist! (62) Uniquely Skilled (97) Unreliable Narrator (56) Weird and Wacky On Purpose (90) Western-Style Fantasy (100) Wrong Place Wrong Time (71) Zero to Hero (93)


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