What happens when a twenty-year veteran of teaching Austen and Brontë finds himself, at 11:47 PM on a Tuesday, grading sophomore essays on The Great Gatsby while listening to a TikTok-famous stalker romance? You get a man questioning every literary principle he's ever held — and enjoying every second of it.
I should be embarrassed. I'm not.
Denise was already asleep, the red pen was bleeding dry on a stack of essays that all somehow misspelled "disillusioned," and I had Lights Out playing low through my earbuds like a secret I was keeping from my own bookshelf. Hemingway would judge me. Faulkner probably wouldn't — that man had his own dark corners.
The English Teacher's Dirty Secret
Let's talk about what Navessa Allen is really doing here, because beneath the high-heat scenes and the premise that would make my department chair clutch her pearls, there's genuinely sharp writing. Aly Cappellucci is a trauma nurse who knows exactly what she wants, and Allen never punishes her for it. That's harder to pull off than it sounds. The internal monologues — Aly's in particular — walk this razor line between vulnerability and self-aware comedy. She's horny and she's funny about it and she's a whole person. The banter between her and Josh isn't just witty filler between plot beats; it's characterization. You learn who these people are through how they make each other laugh.
And then there's the structural trick I didn't see coming. What starts as consensual fantasy — Josh showing up masked in Aly's bedroom after she essentially dares him to — pivots into genuine suspense when a real threat enters the picture. Allen knows exactly when to shift gears, and the tonal pivot from playful stalking to actual danger lands because she spent the first half earning your trust that she understands the difference. That same structural confidence — the willingness to let a book be genuinely unsettling once you've earned the reader's goodwill — is what made Brain Damage stick with me too, though Allen's comic instincts give her the edge.
My students would hate this. I love it.
Jacob Morgan Could Narrate a Tax Form and I'd Listen
The duet narration here is the reason to go audio. Jacob Morgan voicing Josh is — and I say this as a man who has strong opinions about Juliet Stevenson's Middlemarch — genuinely one of the more effective romance performances I've encountered. There's a scene where Josh uses a voice modulator, and Morgan plays it with this low, distorted edge that actually made me stop grading and just listen. He understands that pause is punctuation, and he deploys silence before Josh's most unhinged lines like a comedian holding for the laugh. The comedic timing is impeccable — he can pivot from menacing to self-deprecating in a single sentence without it feeling like whiplash.
Elena Wolfe as Aly is solid. Not electric in the same way, but she handles Aly's internal monologue — which is essentially a running stand-up routine about her own questionable life choices — with the right light touch. She doesn't oversell the humor, which is smart. The duet format means they're sometimes in dialogue together across their respective chapters, and the interplay works. You believe these two people are in the same room.
If I have a gripe, it's that Wolfe occasionally reads Aly's more emotionally raw moments at the same register as her comedic ones. There's a scene late in the book where Aly confronts real fear — not the fun kind — and I wanted a gear shift that didn't quite arrive.
Who Gets an A, Who Gets a Hall Pass (And Who Should Skip)
If you loved Butcher & Blackbird and want something with a similar blend of dark romance and genuine humor, this is its spiritual successor — maybe even an improvement on the balance between comedy and threat. If you're coming from the Haunting Adeline side of things, expect less brooding and more laughing. The darkness here has a wink to it.
But if explicit content isn't your thing, this isn't the book that'll convert you. Allen earned those content warnings. And if you need your romance heroes morally spotless, Josh Hammond is going to be a problem for you. He breaks into this woman's house. He enjoys it. She enjoys it. Skip this one if either of those dealbreakers applies — no judgment, but Allen isn't meeting you halfway on them. The writing deserves to be savored, but you have to be willing to savor this particular flavor.
Worth Pausing the Faculty Meeting For
I finished this at 12:30 AM with a stack of ungraded Gatsby essays and a strange urge to text Denise about it — which I did not do, because she was asleep and also because explaining this book to my wife at midnight felt like a conversation I wasn't ready for. But here's the thing: Allen wrote a book that's smarter than it needs to be, funnier than you'd expect, and performed by a narrator in Jacob Morgan who treats every line like it matters. The author chose those words. Morgan chose to honor them. At 1.0x speed, naturally.
I'll be on my lakefront walk tomorrow pretending I'm thinking about Fitzgerald. I won't be.
