New York Times, Thursday, January 2, 2020

Working with short theme entries, I tried to have as many as possible, but eight plus a revealer did make for compromises on the fill, with a fair number of three-letter entries. The NW had to be changed to eliminate NARCISSI, and the only replacement was AIR SINAI.

Nyctophobia is one of many words used to describe the fear of darkness. This one comes from the Greek word for "night," thus "fear of the night."

I was happy to be able to introduce the entry DARK N STORMY, a nice concoction of dark rum, ginger beer, and a slice of lime.

I'm glad that Will chose to reference the revealer to Darth Vader and the "Star Wars" mythology. The puzzle begins with FEAR and ends with THE DARK SIDE, bringing to mind a quote from Yoda "Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering." Segue to the words of FDR, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," and we have a lesson for our time.

Who's afraid of the DARK? Not Ed! We've written in the key words (see grid below), which hopefully makes the concept clear. I've seen a bunch of "black squares mean BLACK or DARK" themes, but I liked how the revealer made this one distinct. THE DARK SIDE calls to this uber-nerd, and it describes the concept perfectly.

We wrote in the four DARKs below because I had a hard time picturing where they were. Was the problem that a couple of movies I either didn't know or had forgotten ("Wait Until Dark" and the unfortunate "Darkman")? Or was it the awkwardness of BE IN THE DARK? Or NSTORMY as the only partial-looking theme entry? Whatever the case, I kept on losing track of the four special squares.

For this theme type, I like it best when those special squares stand out more. The best way is to make them the only squares that are by themselves (like the one between SPCA and STOPGAPS), but that does create filling challenges.

Making all the themer pairs span the entire grid helps make them stand out, but there's a tiny NIT to pick, that NIT isn't part of the theme.

I wondered if it would have been better to use only three sets of themers, which would have allowed for a cleaner puzzle. However, in the end, I decided I liked Ed's decision, which gave the puzzle a (dark) meatier feel. A couple of ORNO ARIE UAR blips were worth it. Along with some JOHN DOE STOPGAPS AIR SINAI bonuses, it's a reasonable set of trade-offs.

A couple of more recognizable entries like A SHOT IN THE DARK, DARK MEAT, WENT DARK, would have helped sharpen the solving experience. Overall though, the apt revealer helped pull everything together.