“When are you going to kill me?”
It’s amazing how a single question can change everything. For a young woman in the hands of a madman, this single question may have been the catalyst to her survival—the action responsible for saving her life.
Keeping Her in the Light explores the relationship between captor and captive, predator and prey. This psychological thriller focuses on the events that lie in the uncharted gap between capture and escape as it delves deep into the complexities of Stockholm Syndrome.
The question “When are you going to kill me?” paired up with the question “How are you going to kill me?” only heightens her captor’s interest, leading to his decision to kill her only after she has proven the existence of Stockholm Syndrome. Her courage and her unpredictability only interest him all the more and since he can’t kill her yet, he settles for torture.
Allie doesn’t have an idea about what Stockholm Syndrome is, but she begins to suspect her captor suffers from a multiple personality disorder, except he doesn’t seem to be bothered by it. Further opened doors—transitions—reveal her whereabouts: a mansion with its barred windows and its locked front door. Beauty and light—far from the hope they seem to symbolize—surround her.
Her captor ceases to be what he is after every conversation ranging from fragile glass that can break and be broken, to gardens that wither because of the owner and not the gardener, to hope that can be extracted from darkness as much as it can be gotten from light.
Unaware of it, Allie begins to show signs of Stockholm Syndrome. Unaware of it, her captor begins to show signs of another syndrome, and his only dilemma now is how he is going to kill her while keeping her in the light and away from the darkness that only reveals reality.
