My enormous gratitude to Louise Swanson for ensuring I received a copy of her thriller Lights Out and to Kim Nyamhondera for sending it to me. It’s my pleasure to share my review of Lights Out today.
I’m a huge fan of Louise Swanson’s writing under her other persona of Louise Beech, and you’ll find my reviews of those books here.
Already available in other formats, Lights Out is released in paperback by Hodder and Stoughton on 27th February 2025 and is available for pre-order or purchase through the publisher links here.
Lights Out
When darkness is everywhere, nowhere is safe…
A state of emergency has been declared in the UK. From now on, at 8pm every night, all electricity cuts out.
The Government promises it’s a temporary measure. They promise they are always thinking of your safety.
But for Grace, the darkness is anything but safe.
Someone is coming into her house under its cover every night while she lies in bed upstairs, too terrified to sleep. Someone who knows her past, who knows why she has more reason to fear the dark than most…
And every morning she wakes to a new message from the intruder:
I have you in my sights. Love, The Night
But how can Grace escape, when there’s nowhere safe left to hide?
My Review of Lights Out
Grace is terrified of the dark and a Government energy saving edict that stops all power from 8pm to 7am, plunging her world into darkness, is her worst nightmare.
Lights Out is a cracking story. It is imbued with a sense of menace from the very first page so that whilst you might not want to read on, you simply can’t help yourself. Louise Swanson delves into our darkest fears through Grace’s nyctophobia, doing so with sensitivity and understanding. The narrative is absolutely convincing, and the psychological aspect is particularly unnerving. It’s actually quite difficult to define the genre of Lights Out because it is certainly a thriller, with an intimidating Feather Man terrorising lone women, and the mysterious addition of items into Grace’s home alongside handwritten messages from The Night, but there’s so much more to uncover here too.
Initially Grace irritated me slightly as I wanted her to get a grip on her irrational fear and simply add a bolt to her back door, but as Lights Out continued and the layers of her personality were peeled back, explaining why she is afraid of the dark, illustrating how her past has affected her and showing just how believable and human she is, I not only found Grace realistic, but I grew to care what happened to her. I loved the development of her personality and the changes she undergoes as the story progresses. There’s real skill in writing a character a reader doesn’t much like at the start of a narrative and changing that opinion to one of admiration by the end of it. Her relationship with Riley was a huge factor in shaping my response, as was her attitude towards Tom and her father.
But whilst Lights Out is a slightly futuristic, slightly dystopian thriller with vivid characters that entertains really well, other aspects are the ones I found most affecting and prescient – this could be a story just waiting to happen at any time to any one of us. Elements like social responsibility and justice, a real understanding from the author about mental health, her exploration of the variety of relationships we have, of poverty and privilege, and what it’s like to be an outsider or to struggle with life, ripple throughout so that Lights Out has depth and sensitive social awareness. Not only does this understanding add texture to the plot, but it gives Lights Out a universal importance.
I found Lights Out surprisingly disturbing. Not just for the creepier thriller aspects that take place in the night, but also because of the representation of the kind of world that could be just around the corner if we don’t do something about the environment and if we don’t face our fears… I really recommend it and believe it is a prompt for us to write our own narrative of the future rather than allow others to control it for us. I suggest that you read Lights Out to see what I mean! Don’t miss it.
About Louise Swanson
Louise Swanson’s debut, End of Story, was written during the final lockdown of 2020 – also following a family tragedy, it offered refuge in the fiction she created. The themes of the book – grief, isolation, love of the arts, the power of storytelling – came from a very real place.
Louise Swanson is a mother of two who lives in East Yorkshire with her husband, regularly blogs, talks at events, and is a huge advocate of openly discussing mental health and suicide.
She also writes as Louise Beech. Louise’s books have won the Best magazine Book of the Year 2019, have been shortlisted for the Romantic Novel of the Year, longlisted for the Polari Prize, and been a Clare Mackintosh Book Club Pick. Her memoir, Daffodils, was released in audiobook in 2022, and the paperback version, Eighteen Seconds, in April 2023.
You can follow Louise on Twitter/X @LouiseWriter, find her on Facebook and Instagram and visit her website for further information.
