This review is written with thanks to Hodder & Stoughton and Louise Swanson for my copy of Lights Out.

Blurb:

A state of emergency has been declared in the UK. A complete night-time switch off has begun. 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. It’s something 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 note from the intruder:

I have you in my sights. Love, The Night.

But how can Grace hide, when there’s nowhere left that’s safe?

Review:

I love this author, whether she’s writing as Louise Beech or Louise Swanson, and as Louise Swanson, this is the second high concept speculative novel to which we’ve been treated. The concept of Lights Out, where all electricity is turned off between the hours of 8pm and 8am to conserve energy and combat climate change, felt particularly unsettling to me, as I rely on an electric hoist and wheelchair, which means that without electricity, I would literally be unable to move. Louise Swanson’s writing is so powerful that I was dragged, kicking and screaming, into this world that she has created so precisely and with so much atmosphere and I couldn’t let go. 

The protagonist of Lights Out is Grace, and although she has a very different reason to depend on electricity, I felt totally able to empathise with her. Louise Swanson is absolutely brilliant at creating characters with so much emotional depth and I was intrigued to find out more about Grace. She’s a character with many layers and I wanted to discover more about her history and why she reacted to the situations in the novel in the way she did.

As a story, Lights Out has several layers and I loved being able to peel each one back. The plot itself is written in an incredible way and the atmosphere and sense of foreboding alone made me want to continue reading. However, Louise Swanson has given us much more than that. She has explored in detail several aspects of modern life (which I won’t outline in case of spoilers) and human emotion and many of these resonated with me – and I’m sure other readers will find something in the novel that they can relate to. There are also political undertones to this novel which struck a chord with me, and root the story further in reality and make the plot scarily easy to imagine.

And yes, Louise Swanson did make me cry.

Lights Out is available from Amazon.