Come Out, Come Out Summary, Characters and Themes | Alexia Onyx
Come Out, Come Out by Alexia Onyx is a psychological romance about grief, guilt, obsession, and the desperate need for connection.
It follows Aiden, a young man consumed by the suicide of his twin sister and the hidden truths surrounding her death. After his own violent end, Aiden returns as a ghost, tethered to the house where everything fell apart.
When Skye—a troubled woman drawn to the very same house—enters his world, the story spirals into a darkly intimate portrait of trauma and longing. Blending elements of horror, psychological drama, and twisted romance, the novel explores what it means to be seen, to be haunted, and to be remembered.
Summary
Aiden begins the story reflecting on death with eerie familiarity.
The prologue sets the emotional stage: his twin sister Becca is gone, and her loss weighs heavily on him.
When Aiden returns home in December 2019, he’s a shell of himself—reeling from Becca’s suicide and his own past with Nate, a closeted ex-boyfriend who, along with his friends, was responsible for cyberbullying Becca.
Once Aiden discovers this truth, he lashes out in a violent act of revenge that leaves multiple people dead.
Afterward, Aiden dies by suicide, and his ghost becomes trapped in the house where it all happened.
Now a ghost, Aiden floats through his old home in a state of emptiness until Skye enters.
She visits during a house tour and immediately captures Aiden’s attention.
She is depressive, solitary, and feels familiar to him.
When Skye eventually moves in, Aiden begins to haunt her.
At first, it’s subtle—flickering lights and moving objects—but it escalates quickly.
He becomes increasingly fixated, lashing out at her roommates to drive them away.
Skye stays, sensing the darkness but refusing to back down.
One night, Aiden becomes corporeal again.
He and Skye share a ferocious, emotional, and physical connection, though she has no idea who or what he is.
He vanishes afterward, and she’s left confused and emotionally wrecked.
As months pass, she spirals into depression and drug use.
Aiden, now ghostly once more, watches helplessly.
When she brings people home for comfort, he reacts violently, revealing the dangerous depth of his obsession.
Skye starts speaking aloud to the ghost, asking for space and understanding.
Aiden, increasingly volatile, reacts with guilt and sadness.
Her attempts to heal—through writing, rituals, or social interactions—are repeatedly undermined by Aiden’s lingering presence.
She finds Becca’s belongings in the attic and feels a growing emotional link, not knowing the full connection between Becca, Aiden, and the haunting.
Eventually, Aiden begins to leave her messages.
Skye interprets them as signs of pain and offers forgiveness, even as fear creeps back into her life.
Her letter to the ghost is both a peace offering and a boundary.
Aiden, desperate for closeness, clings to it as a sign she still wants him.
She speaks to him more directly now, even casually.
A blackout brings them closer than ever before—she sees a shadow, senses his nearness, and instead of fleeing, she speaks gently into the dark.
As the lines between past and present blur, Skye reads Becca’s journal aloud.
Aiden, hidden but listening, is overwhelmed.
It’s the first time he truly grieves his sister, feeling the weight of what happened in full.
When Skye says she needs to move on, Aiden becomes visible again—if only briefly.
He whispers her name, and it’s the first time she knows she’s not alone.
The final chapters center on their last encounter.
During a thunderstorm, Aiden becomes fully corporeal.
Skye walks through the house, drawn by an invisible force, and finds him standing there.
Their reunion is messy—full of passion, grief, and truth.
Aiden confesses everything: Becca, the murders, his death, and his obsession with her.
Despite the horror, Skye feels love too.
They make love again, one final, painful time, before Aiden begins to fade.
His presence in her world cannot last.
Skye wakes up alone the next morning, bloody and dazed.
Paramedics arrive, and she’s taken to a hospital.
Everyone believes she hallucinated everything—her file mentions trauma, self-harm, and substance abuse.
But Skye knows what she saw.
She begins writing her story down, refusing to forget him.
In the closing moments, she glimpses a figure at the edge of the trees—just a shadow, maybe—but to her, it’s proof that he was real.
Characters
Aiden
Aiden is the deeply tormented protagonist of the novel. His descent into violence and obsession is both tragic and haunting.
In life, Aiden is wracked with guilt over the suicide of his twin sister Becca. This loss fractures his sense of identity and purpose.
His grief becomes compounded by the realization that Becca’s death was partially caused by the actions of Nate, Aiden’s closeted former lover, and his homophobic circle. The guilt mutates into rage, culminating in Aiden’s retaliatory murders and his own death.
As a ghost, Aiden is tethered to the site of his trauma. He veers between voyeuristic longing and possessive fury, especially when Skye enters his life.
Skye becomes an emotional anchor for him—someone he desires not just physically but spiritually. His obsession blends yearning for connection with the desperate need to rewrite the past.
His occasional returns to corporeality complicate his existence. These moments heighten the stakes of his love and reinforce the theme of a man caught between worlds, never fully belonging to either.
Skye
Skye is a loner marked by emotional numbness, artistic ambition, and psychological fragility. When she moves into the haunted house, she is already reeling from depression, addiction, and a fragmented sense of self.
Her journey is one of spiraling mental illness, interrupted by eerie intrusions from Aiden’s ghostly presence. Despite being haunted—both literally and emotionally—Skye never falls fully into the role of a victim.
She confronts her fears and challenges the ghost. She maintains a gritty autonomy even as her mind begins to fracture.
Her relationship with Aiden is turbulent and toxic. It is rooted in shared pain and primal connection rather than healing.
Yet, her willingness to acknowledge her trauma and seek closure indicates resilience. Skye is a complex portrait of a woman battling her inner demons while being haunted by a very real one.
She tries to untangle what love, loss, and madness really mean in her life. In doing so, she becomes one of the most psychologically rich characters in the novel.
Becca
Though deceased before the main events of the novel, Becca casts a long and powerful shadow over the narrative. As Aiden’s twin, her suicide serves as the inciting trauma that drives the plot.
Becca is revealed to have been sensitive, artistic, and deeply hurt by bullying and betrayal. Her suffering was particularly intensified by Nate and his peers.
Her presence lingers through physical artifacts like the butterfly earring and her journals. She also appears in the emotional memories evoked by both Aiden and Skye.
Skye’s discovery of Becca’s belongings bridges the past and present. It deepens the emotional layers of the narrative.
Becca becomes a symbol of innocence corrupted by cruelty. She represents the burden of unresolved grief.
Whether her spirit also lingers in the house is left ambiguous. More than anything, she embodies the painful ripple effect of untreated mental health struggles and societal rejection.
Nate
Nate is both a perpetrator and a victim. His narrative role is brief but his impact is long-lasting.
As Aiden’s former lover who remained closeted, Nate participated in—or at least enabled—the bullying that led to Becca’s suicide. His dual role as someone who hurt Aiden and once cared for him makes his murder a tragic and violent act of betrayal.
Nate symbolizes the damaging effects of internalized homophobia and societal pressure. His fear of being outed leads him to cruel complicity.
The complexity of his character lies in that contradiction. He is both a source of deep love and deep harm for Aiden.
His death ignites the chain of supernatural events. He is the first domino to fall in the emotionally driven horror that unfolds.
Ava
Ava is a minor character, but she serves as a critical touchstone of normalcy. She is one of the few people from Skye’s life who briefly connects her to the outside world.
Ava represents rationality, stability, and an un-haunted life. Her visits to Skye offer glimpses of a reality free of ghosts, addiction, and emotional chaos.
When the ghost begins to interfere during Ava’s visit, the contrast becomes even sharper. Ava’s fear and eventual distance reflect how isolated Skye has become.
Ava is not just a friend—she is a narrative foil. Her presence underscores the depth of Skye’s descent and the power of Aiden’s influence.
She reminds the reader of what Skye is fighting to hold onto, or possibly recover. Ava’s role may be small, but it is symbolically significant.
Themes
Grief and the Inescapability of Loss
At its heart, Come Out, Come Out is a meditation on grief as a corrosive, ever-present force. Aiden’s entire post-death existence is rooted in the unresolved trauma of his twin sister Becca’s suicide.
His decision to murder those responsible before dying himself does not ease his sorrow—it calcifies it into something unrelenting. His transformation into a ghost symbolizes the psychological reality of being unable to move past grief, of remaining fixed in a moment of pain that resists the natural flow of time.
Similarly, Skye’s trajectory throughout the novel is defined by the echo of personal losses, though less explicit than Aiden’s. Her downward spiral, characterized by self-harm, drug use, and emotional paralysis, shows how grief can manifest in the living as a silent erosion of self.
The house becomes a kind of mausoleum not just for the dead, but for the unprocessed sorrow of the living. Every interaction between Aiden and Skye becomes a reenactment of what grief refuses to let go of—the desire to reclaim, possess, and understand what has been taken.
Even their physical union is marked more by despair than passion, revealing how grief perverts intimacy into desperation. The novel insists that grief doesn’t simply fade; it mutates, and if unaddressed, can become a haunting that distorts perception and isolates the sufferer from the world.
Obsession and Possession
Obsession in Come Out, Come Out masquerades as love but reveals itself as a desire for control. Aiden’s fixation on Skye transcends the boundaries of death, and while initially born from loneliness and longing, it quickly devolves into a dangerous need to possess.
His invisible presence in her home, his watching, his violent reactions when she brings others close—all reflect a compulsion that sees Skye not as an independent person but as a vessel for his unfulfilled desire to connect and be needed. The haunting is not just supernatural but psychological.
He wants her to validate his existence, to affirm that his suffering matters, and in doing so, he places the emotional burden of his redemption on her shoulders. Skye, for her part, develops a strange dependence on the ghost’s presence.
Even though she doesn’t fully understand it, she comes to associate it with intimacy and attention, however distorted. The novel challenges the romanticization of obsessive love by stripping it down to its rawest core: fear, insecurity, and control masked as devotion.
Aiden’s momentary returns to physicality bring no clarity or peace; instead, they intensify the imbalance of power. His final appearance, full of confession and desperate passion, is less a resolution and more a climax of possessive need.
The novel suggests that obsession is not a deeper form of love—it is its corruption, a refusal to let someone be free because their presence feels necessary for one’s survival.
Isolation and the Desperate Search for Connection
Both protagonists exist in profound isolation, and the novel meticulously traces how this solitude drives their actions and choices. Aiden, as a ghost, is cut off not only from the living but from the ability to affect his surroundings meaningfully, which becomes a metaphor for emotional disconnection.
His death was meant to be an act of closure, but it only cemented his loneliness. His obsession with Skye stems from her own visible despair, which mirrors his own.
Skye is similarly isolated, but by the social world. Her friends abandon her, she pushes people away, and her pain is largely internalized.
Her attempts to engage—whether through art, casual sex, or spiritual rituals—are all desperate gestures to break through her emotional quarantine. Even her openness to the ghost’s presence, which many would interpret as madness, underscores a human need to feel seen and heard.
When she finally begins to talk to the ghost regularly, it isn’t just about curiosity—it’s about needing someone, anyone, to listen and respond. The connection they form is real but built on mutual damage.
The book resists giving them a fairy-tale resolution because it understands that connection forged in pain, while intense, is not always healing. Instead, the relationship becomes a reflection of how isolation can make people cling to the few sources of attention or recognition they receive, even if those sources are ultimately harmful or illusory.
Guilt, Redemption, and the Limits of Forgiveness
Guilt permeates Come Out, Come Out—not as a fleeting emotion, but as a defining condition for both Aiden and Skye. Aiden is tormented by his role in Becca’s death, not just because of the bullying she endured but because of his perceived failure to protect her.
His murders are acts of vengeance that he initially justifies, but as time passes, the moral weight begins to haunt him more than any ghost ever could. Skye also carries guilt, though more abstract.
Her self-harming behaviors and emotional volatility stem from a deeper belief that she is broken or unworthy of care. This shared guilt becomes the unspoken language between them, even before they speak.
When Aiden confesses everything, hoping for redemption, it becomes clear that acknowledgment is not absolution. Skye’s reaction is a complex blend of horror and sympathy—she sees him fully and still chooses not to condemn him entirely, but that doesn’t mean she can save him.
The novel doesn’t allow forgiveness to be a clean act; it shows how the truth can create further rupture even as it provides understanding. Redemption, if it exists, is internal and deeply personal.
Aiden’s final fading is not framed as punishment or salvation, but as a necessary consequence of trying to exist in a space he no longer belongs to. Skye’s act of writing down what happened, her refusal to forget, becomes a kind of grace—not for Aiden, but for herself.
It is a way of asserting that while forgiveness may be withheld or incomplete, the story still deserves to be told.
The Blurred Boundaries Between Reality and the Supernatural
Throughout the novel, the boundary between the real and the supernatural is ambiguous, and this ambiguity is one of the book’s most effective tools. The reader is never given a definitive answer as to whether Aiden’s reappearances are real or hallucinatory.
Skye’s deteriorating mental health, her history of substance use, and her intense emotional state all suggest the possibility of a psychotic break. Yet the specificity of her interactions with Aiden, the physical injuries, the shared memories, and the emotional continuity all imply something far beyond imagination.
This tension reflects how trauma distorts perception. In grief and isolation, the line between what is happening and what is feared or desired to happen becomes fragile.
The ghost in this novel is both literal and metaphorical—a symbol of everything unresolved and unspeakable. The house functions not just as a haunted location but as a psychic space where past and present collapse.
When Aiden becomes corporeal, it is less a supernatural feat and more an emotional culmination—the weight of his need to be acknowledged finally piercing the veil. The novel never clarifies whether this is spiritual resurrection or psychological projection, because that clarity is beside the point.
What matters is that for Skye, it was real enough to break her and rebuild her. By the end, the reader is left questioning what counts as truth when trauma shapes memory.
In doing so, the book critiques the idea that supernatural experiences can be neatly explained, suggesting instead that the most haunting things are often the ones we live with inside our own minds.