YMMV / Moonlight Becomes You

• Angst? What Angst?: Maggie is surprisingly calm and cheerful just five days after she was violently attacked, spent a day in a coffin and nearly suffocated to death. And this is only weeks after she found her murdered stepmother's body. Neil seems more outwardly upset about it and he wasn't even the one in the coffin. Then again, Maggie is depicted as quite a resilient person after going through a lot of traumatic stuff throughout her life; she also tends to keep her angsting internal. In-universe, Neil expresses surprise at her humorously referring to her ordeal in the coffin and she just replies that gallows humor has helped her cope many times.
• Nightmare Fuel: Maggie being buried alive is quite possibly one of the most bone-chilling things Mary Higgins Clark has ever written. Maggie wakes up cold, bleeding and alone in the dark, and realizes she can't move much. She quickly deduces she's been buried in a coffin and her only hope is to pull a string attached to a bell above ground, the same method the Victorians used in case they were accidentally buried alive...only the killer has removed the clapper from her bell. And then the killer comes back just to taunt her and packs the vent with mud so she'll slowly suffocate. She's in there for a whole day, using every inch of her willpower to not fall asleep because she knows she won't wake up, and only just has enough strength to pull the bell string one last time to alert Neil.
• Unintentional Period Piece: A few details make it obvious the story is set in the mid-1990s.
  • Several characters use car phones, which became increasingly obsolete by the end of the decade due to cellphones becoming more compact and thus commonplace; Earl actually says he's a "hold-out" for not owning a car phone.
  • Speaking of which, only a handful of characters have cellphones and they rarely use them, whereas nowadays almost everyone does, especially considering the careers some of the characters are involved in. In particular, professional photographer Maggie is mentioned having to wait for her photographs to be developed at a drugstore, whereas these days she'd probably take pictures with her phone if she didn't have access to her photography gear. Neil could also probably have gotten in contact with Maggie far more easily if they both had access to cellphones and social media.
  • A more tragic detail is the fact that Neil has an office in the second tower of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, clearly placing the story prior to the terrorist attacks in September 2001 that destroyed the towers.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Neil's attempts to track down Maggie in Newport and insistence on helping her investigate Nuala's murder is intended to show how much he loves Maggie and wants to prove this to her after his previous neglect. While Neil's actions are well-intentioned and Maggie states in the end she doesn't mind his protectiveness as it's nice to have someone looking out for her, Neil can at times come off as rather pushy and borderline stalkerish towards Maggie. She tends to find his attempts to insert himself into her life frustrating and is outright cold towards him sometimes, yet Neil persists in trying to get to her to open up to him, telling her what to do and showing up to her home uninvited. It's not like they're in a relationship either; despite their mutual attraction, at this point they're still just friends who have only known each other for six months, so Neil can seem a little overly familiar and presumptuous (Maggie herself even calls him out on this).
• The Woobie: Maggie Holloway, with shades of Iron Woobie. Her biological mother died when she was a baby, her father was a controlling killjoy who drove away her stepmother Nuala (who was like a mother to her) and let her believe Nuala abandoned her for nearly twenty years; she later learned he actually intercepted and destroyed all the letters Nuala wrote to her. She was happily married for a few years until she was suddenly widowed before she even turned thirty. She's reunited with Nuala and they're both ecstatic to be able to share their lives again...only when Maggie turns up for a visit she finds her stepmother has been brutally murdered. And that's without mentioning that she ends up buried alive in a coffin and it was her own love interest who put her there.

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