The Storm
The Lightsverse Wiki
This article contains spoilers for The Lights and Profit à Prendre.
Hurricane Lightshow or simply the storm was a weather disturbance and major plot event in the early chapters ofThe Lights, also appearing in Profit à Prendre.
The storm was created likely as a result of Lightshow energy disrupting the weather patterns over the Atlantic, presumably heating the water enough for the storm to form, following newly created jetstreams. It is the event to solidify the survivors' dynamics and power structure, serving as a turning point for many of the cast that would go on to become the Final Six, as well as serving as a primer on the fact that Lightshows could affect the world beyond their intended use before the Lightstorm would be introduced in La Spezia.
Appearance in The Lights
The storm was originally detected via the Viking Star's radar systems.
Appearance in Profit à Prendre
The storm, in the days after the Viking Star's ordeal, strengthened significantly and was a category five hurricane by the time it made landfall in Newfoundland, destroying the floating community of Colinet and killing all but two of its inhabitants.
Appearance in Afterglow
On the first morning at sea, Silvyr Rose displayed a segment of The Lights containing the moment that Peter discovers the storm. Silvyr and Lexi McManus divert the Viking Star away from the storm to Lisbon, and the storm is not encountered directly.
Meteorological Feasibility
Peter notes in The Lights that "[the storm] shouldn't even be possible where [they] are", although this is not strictly the case. In reality, multiple major storms a year form in the North Atlantic Basin, however few make it to the position it was encountered in The Lights, equivalent in latitude roughly to New York State and longitute to the western coast of Iceland.
Trivia
In the original outline of The Lights, the storm was intended to cripple the Viking Star and leave it without power, at which point a lone zombie would be released from the engine area and begin killing the characters one by one. Artemis was to be the final character to die, though she would either succumb to the twelve zombies or take her own life after ending up alone on a powerless ship drifting in the Atlantic.
The phrase Hurricane Lightshow does not appear in any Lightsverse media and is a joke name used by Silvyr Pickering when referring to it off the page.