Her Soul to Take

Her Soul to Take is a book that knows exactly what it wants to be. It is a dark paranormal romance with a demon love interest, a small-town cult, a Final Girl who refuses to be a victim, and a lot of explicit sex. It was self-published in 2021, and it found an audience through word of mouth rather than a big marketing campaign. The version I read is the 458-page paperback from Harley Laroux Publications. If you are looking for a cozy romance with a brooding supernatural boyfriend, this is not it. If you want a horror story where the romance is part of the horror, it might be exactly what you are after.

The setup is simple and effective. A demon named Leon has been bound to the Hadleigh family for over a century. Kent Hadleigh, the current patriarch, owns the grimoire that contains Leon's true name, which means Kent can summon him, command him, and punish him. Leon is not a tame demon. He is old, dangerous, and deeply resentful of the leash. But he cannot break it, so he does Kent's dirty work while looking for a way out.

Kent is the leader of a cult called the Libiri, and the Libiri worship something called the Deep One, a god sleeping under the town of Abelaum, Washington. The Deep One is waking up, and Kent believes it needs sacrifices. The first is a young man named Marcus Kynes, whose body Leon is sent to retrieve from a cemetery and deliver to the White Pine mine. Marcus is a descendant of someone the Deep One once saved, which makes him a life owed to the god. Kent's son Jeremiah throws the body into the mine shaft. It is an ugly, efficient opening, and it tells you what kind of people the Hadleighs are.

Abelaum itself is a good horror setting. It is a small town with a dark history, the kind of place where everyone knows everyone and the powerful family has been powerful for generations. Laroux does not spend pages describing the architecture, but she gives you enough to feel the damp, the woods, and the sense of a community that has learned not to ask certain questions. The mine is the novel's central image: a hole in the ground where something old and hungry is waiting, and a place the town has built its prosperity on top of.

Rae comes home

Raelynn Lawson, who goes by Rae, has returned to Abelaum to finish her last year of university. She grew up there, and she has mixed feelings about being back. She runs a paranormal vlog, which is not making money yet, and she is hoping that Abelaum's reputation for ghosts and strange occurrences will give her the content she needs to turn the channel into a career.

Her best friend Inaya runs a bookstore in town. Inaya gives Rae an old handwritten book with an illustration of a demon with gold eyes. Rae is drawn to the image. She does not know it yet, but the book is connected to Leon, and the demon in the drawing is not a metaphor.

At school, Rae meets a man who introduces himself as a security guard. He is rude, attractive, and strangely familiar. This is Leon, who has been sent to watch her. The attraction between them is immediate and hostile, which is a staple of the genre, but Laroux gives it a twist. Rae is not simply swept off her feet. She is suspicious, and she keeps pushing back, and Leon is not used to being questioned by a human.

Rae also meets Jeremiah and Victoria Hadleigh, Kent's children, who are friendly in the way that rich people are friendly when they want something. They invite her into their world. Rae is lonely enough to accept.

The summoning

The book's first major turn comes when Rae decides to summon the demon from the grimoire. She thinks it is a stunt for her vlog. She does not expect it to work. It works. Leon appears in a cloud of smoke, and Rae assumes he is playing a prank on her. Then she reviews the footage and sees his demon form, and she understands that she has called something real.

Leon is not happy about it. He is also not entirely in control of the situation. Rae has the grimoire, or at least a connection to it, and the book gives her a hold over him. She refuses to hand it over, because it is the only thing keeping her safe. Leon tells her that the Eld are coming for her, and that she needs his protection. The Eld are forest creatures, servants of the Deep One, and they are not subtle. One of them attacks Rae, and Leon kills it. Another takes her cat, Cheesecake, and Leon saves the cat and kills that one too. He mounts three Eld heads on stakes around her yard as a warning.

This is the part of the book where the romance starts to become a negotiation. Leon offers Rae protection in exchange for her soul. She refuses. He keeps offering. She keeps refusing. They have sex, and the power dynamic is complicated, because he is a demon who could destroy her and she is a human who holds the book that can command him. Laroux is interested in that tension. The book is explicit about consent, sometimes to the point of being didactic, but the care is genuine. Rae is allowed to want what she wants and to say no to what she does not want, and Leon is forced to respect it.

Rae eventually learns how long Leon has been imprisoned. She feels sorry for him, which is dangerous, because sympathy is not the same as trust. When he is injured protecting her, she tends his wound, and then she draws a binding circle around him while he sleeps. He wakes up furious. She has used his vulnerability against him. She apologizes, but the damage is done. The scene is a good example of what the book does well: it lets both characters be right and wrong at the same time.

The Hadleighs

The Hadleighs are the novel's real monsters. Kent is a believer, which makes him more frightening than a simple villain. He thinks he is saving humanity by feeding the Deep One. Jeremiah is a predator who uses his family's money and charm to hurt people. Victoria is harder to read. She seems frightened of her father, and she reaches out to Rae more than once. Meredith, Kent's wife, is mostly in the background. Everly, another member of the household, steals the grimoire from Rae's cabin and sets off a chain of events that puts Rae in even more danger.

The cult material is where the book gets its horror. The Libiri are not a vague Satanic panic. They are a small-town power structure, a family with money and secrets, and a theology that justifies human sacrifice. Kent tells Rae that she is destined to be sacrificed, and that one of his own children is destined too. Three sacrifices will make the Deep One merciful. The logic is insane, but it is internally consistent, which is worse.

The Halloween party at the Hadleigh mansion is the book's best set piece. Rae goes there to find a relic that might protect her from the Deep One. Jeremiah gives her a drink laced with a drug, and Juniper Kynes, Marcus's sister, makes her throw it up. Juniper is one of the most interesting side characters, a young woman who has lost her brother to the cult and is trying to survive inside it. Rae and Leon search the basement where Leon was imprisoned and find a magical dagger. When they come out, Kent is waiting with a gun.

The descent

The last third is a chase. Jeremiah gives himself over to the Deep One and becomes something more than human. He summons a Reaper, a monster that nearly kills Leon. Leon gives Rae the page of the grimoire with his true name on it and tells her to run. She does not run. She goes back for him, and she is captured.

Jeremiah carves symbols into Rae's chest and throws her down the mine shaft. At the bottom, she finds Victoria's body. The Deep One is there, enormous and ancient, and it wants her. Rae does the one thing she has been refusing to do since the beginning. She carves Leon's name into her own skin and gives him her soul. It is not a romantic gesture in the conventional sense. It is a tactical decision, made in a mine shaft with a god closing in. Because her soul belongs to Leon, the Deep One cannot take it. She stabs the god repeatedly and forces it to let her go.

The mine collapses, and the bond between Rae and Leon pulls her out. Leon wants to kill Jeremiah and the Libiri, but Juniper and Zane have already killed Jeremiah and set the Hadleigh house on fire. The villains are defeated by the people they hurt, not by the hero. Rae survives with scars, including the scar of Leon's name, which she loves.

What the book is doing

Her Soul to Take is often described as dark romance, and that label is accurate, but it is also a horror novel. The cult, the Eld, the Reaper, and the Deep One are not set dressing. They create a world where the romance has stakes. Rae and Leon's relationship is not just about whether they will kiss. It is about whether Rae will survive, whether Leon will be free, and whether either of them can trust the other.

The consent theme is central. Leon is bound to the Hadleighs, and his relationship with Rae begins with another kind of binding. Laroux is careful to show Rae setting boundaries, Leon asking permission, and both of them negotiating what they want. Some readers will find this refreshing. Others will find it repetitive, because the book returns to the same conversation about trust several times. I think the repetition is intentional. Rae has been hurt by people who claimed to care about her, and she needs to hear the promises more than once.

The title is doing more work than it first appears to do. "Her soul to take" sounds like a threat, and for most of the book it is one. Leon keeps asking for Rae's soul, and she keeps refusing, because giving it to him would mean giving up the only thing that is truly hers. When she finally does it, the act is not a surrender. It is the one move the Deep One cannot counter. The book is smart enough to make the romantic climax and the horror climax the same event, and that is why the ending lands even when the plot is moving too fast.

The prose is readable and fast. Laroux writes short chapters and alternates between Rae and Leon's points of view, which keeps the pace up and lets you see the same events from two angles. The sex scenes are frequent and explicit, and they are written with an eye on power and consent rather than pure sensation. If that is not what you want, this is not the book for you.

The weaknesses are real. The worldbuilding is thin in places. The rules of the magic are not always clear, and the Deep One is more of a presence than a character. Some of the side characters, especially Meredith and Everly, are underdeveloped. The ending is rushed, with several major deaths happening off the page. And the book's treatment of trauma is sometimes too neat, as if a single act of love can undo years of abuse.

But the central relationship works. Rae is not a passive heroine waiting to be rescued. She makes choices, some of them bad, and she lives with the consequences. Leon is not a misunderstood puppy. He is a demon who has done terrible things, and the book does not pretend otherwise. Their romance is built on mutual need and mutual danger, and that is what makes it compelling.

If you like your romance with a body count, a cult, and a demon who actually acts like a demon, Her Soul to Take is worth your time. Just check the content warnings first. It earns its dark label.