Lights Out

Navessa Allen released Lights Out in 2024, and the book is an example of how quickly a self-published dark romance can travel when the reading community adopts it: within a year it was in print from Zando's Slowburn list, the imprint the publisher keeps for books that sit at the darker end of romance. Allen writes in the first person and alternates between the two leads, giving the reader the stalker's interior monologue alongside the woman's growing suspicion that she is not being paranoid.

The premise begins with an algorithm and a phone rather than a meeting. The female lead is drawn to a kind of image she is faintly embarrassed by, and the male lead is a masked man who has been in the background of her feed and her building for longer than she knows. What follows is a romance in which the danger is not an external villain but the person she is falling for, and in which the humour running underneath the threat is deliberate rather than incidental.

The book ships with the content warnings common to its subgenre, and the author's note directs readers to them before the first chapter. It is a standalone, and it belongs beside the dark contemporary romances on the shelf rather than with the lighter romantic comedies.