Stacy Willingham’s A Flicker in the Dark maps the unsettling terrain where memory, fear, and love fracture into doubt. Through the spiraling perspective of Chloe Davis, the novel asks how far the past can reach and how easily trust can curdle into terror. What emerges is a web of themes that question what evil looks like, who gets to define the truth, and how families turn secrets into prisons.
Major Themes
The Lingering Trauma of the Past
The Lingering Trauma of the Past powers both the plot and Chloe’s psyche, showing how trauma behaves less like a memory than a living force. Chloe’s career as a psychologist, her rigid safety routines (parking under streetlights, checking the back seat), and even her empathy for patients like Lacey Deckler—“I actually do... I do know what that’s like”—all trace back to discovering her father’s crimes as a child. The 20-year anniversary and the copycat killings rip open those wounds, proving the past doesn’t fade; it resurfaces.
Deception and Appearance vs. Reality
Deception and Appearance vs. Reality frames a world in which safety and danger wear the same face. The loving father, Richard Davis, is “a monster in plain sight,” Chloe’s poised professional exterior masks anxiety and illicit self-medication, and Daniel Briggs plays the perfect fiancé while hiding family truths. The ultimate rupture—Cooper’s guilt and the father’s false confession—exposes how a convincing facade can shield the worst truths.
The Nature of Evil and Monstrosity
The Nature of Evil and Monstrosity redefines monsters as heartbreakingly ordinary. The book moves from childhood shadows to the adult clarity that evil is intimate: Richard speaks of a “darkness inside,” Aaron Jansen / Tyler Price turns obsession into imitation, and Cooper’s charm hides a chilling absence of empathy. Willingham suggests evil is not otherworldly but human—familiar, persuasive, and often loved.
Family Secrets and Dysfunctional Loyalty
Family Secrets and Dysfunctional Loyalty corrodes the Davis family from within, showing how protection becomes complicity. Richard’s decision to take the fall for Cooper spares a son but devastates everyone else; Mona’s silence curdles into collapse; Chloe and Cooper’s “protective” bond becomes a manipulation. Even Daniel’s secret—faking his sister’s death to save her—offers a warped mirror, contrasting destructive and protective loyalties, while the jewelry box of trophies and the abandoned Breaux Bridge home embody the rot of what’s hidden.
Memory, Paranoia, and Unreliable Narration
Memory, Paranoia, and Unreliable Narration turns Chloe’s mind into a maze where fear re-edits the past. Mixing prescriptions with alcohol, she moves through “fuzzy” nights, flashbacks that feel present, and suspicions that misfire—from Bert Rhodes to Daniel to Aaron—echoing her earlier misjudgment of Ethan Walker. The title, A Flicker in the Dark, becomes a thesis: perception offers only a wavering light, just enough to mislead.
Supporting Themes
Guilt and Responsibility
Chloe carries inherited and survivor’s guilt, first for her father’s supposed crimes, then for failing to see the ones closest to her. That burden sends her into psychology, fuels her compulsion to solve the new murders, and binds her to victims like Lacey Deckler, knotting this theme to both lingering trauma and deception.
Control vs. Helplessness
Trauma breeds Chloe’s hunger for control—medication, routines, careful staging of a “normal” life—while Cooper’s murders enact control as domination. The novel pivots when Chloe drugs Cooper, reclaiming agency after years of fear, collapsing this theme into trauma, monstrosity, and family loyalty.
The Burden of a Name
Being “Dick Davis’s daughter” brands Chloe in her community and in her own mind. That label amplifies paranoia (how others see her), deepens guilt (what she might “carry”), and makes deception easier to weaponize against her.
Theme Interactions
- Trauma → Unreliable Narration: The lingering past distorts memory and perception, so Chloe’s mind becomes both witness and suspect. Her fear blurs facts, and that blur generates suspense as much as any external threat.
- Deception ↔ Family Secrets: Public facades depend on private silence; the Davis family’s loyalty manufactures a credible illusion of normalcy that hides a lethal truth. The cost is collective: moral rot, psychological collapse, and new victims.
- Monstrosity → Deception: The novel insists that true predators perform normalcy. Charm, love, and small-town wholesomeness are camouflage; masks are not accessories but weapons.
- Control vs. Helplessness ↔ Trauma: Trauma produces rituals of control in Chloe and a compulsion to control others in Cooper. Their final confrontation flips the power dynamic, turning coping into action.
- The Burden of a Name → Guilt and Paranoia: Chloe’s inherited identity primes her to doubt herself and accept blame, making her more vulnerable to manipulation and more determined to seek justice.
Character Embodiment
Chloe Davis
Chloe Davis personifies lingering trauma and unreliable narration: a clinician chasing the “why” of evil while privately policing her fear with pills, routines, and denial. Her empathy (“I do know what that’s like”) entwines guilt with responsibility, and her final act of seizing control reframes her from haunted observer to agent of truth.
Cooper Davis
Cooper Davis is the nexus of deception, monstrosity, and control. He weaponizes the role of protective brother, survives by secrecy and charm, and exposes how familial love can shelter predation.
Richard Davis
Richard Davis embodies evil’s banality and loyalty’s corruption. His “darkness inside” confession and self-sacrifice twist love into a lie that imprisons his family in grief and shame.
Mona Davis
Mona’s silence and collapse trace the psychology of family secrets: loyalty as self-erasure. She illustrates how hidden truths metastasize into catatonia, embodying the cost of protecting the unprotectable.
Daniel Briggs
Daniel Briggs complicates deception and loyalty by using secrecy to save rather than destroy. His concealed past makes him both red herring and counterexample, sharpening the book’s moral questions about means and ends.
Aaron Jansen / Tyler Price
Aaron Jansen / Tyler Price shows monstrosity as contagion—obsession curdling into imitation. His masquerade underscores how deception enables evil to spread and how notoriety invites replication.
Bert Rhodes
Bert Rhodes represents the long half-life of grief and rage. His suspicion-laden presence reflects the town’s collective trauma and the thin line between seeking justice and being consumed by it.
Lacey Deckler
Lacey Deckler crystallizes Chloe’s empathic identification with victims, linking guilt, responsibility, and the desperate need to be believed. Through her, the personal becomes professional—and perilously intimate.
Lena Rhodes
Lena Rhodes, the first victim, haunts the narrative as a symbol of innocence lost. The released firefly at the end nods to her memory, turning grief into a fragile gesture of liberation and truth.