Summary of The Soul Beast

I've written a summary of my novel which I think I will send around to publishers. Does it make you want to read it?


Aurilanus is an adolescent girl of the aristocracy whose birth mother, Criona, was executed during her daughter's childhood on charges of witchcraft. When Aurilanus's curiosity into her mother's death leads her to uncover a religious text once in Criona's possession, Aurilanus decides to keep and read the book, becoming attracted by its ideas. Upon her father's discovery of this, Aurilanus is sent away to a temple where her stepmother spent her formative years. At the temple, Aurilanus uncovers the connections between her mother's past, her father's plans for secession from the empire, and her stepmother's recent murder. As the plot is uncovered, Aurilanus feels an increasing dependency upon the source of the majority of her information, the fearsome, yet seductive, superior of the temple, Seraphina. Seraphina is also the leader of the cult which ensnared Criona, but Seraphina twists information so that Aurilanus is unable to see their responsibility in her mother's death. What is more, Seraphina fosters in Aurilanus mistrust of her father, and through desire and logic, she convinces Aurilanus to join with her. Aurilanus is groomed as the cult's messiah, and as she carries out their murderous agenda, she is able to mitigate her guilt by way of a feeling of impotency in her own fate. It is only through the efforts of unlikely friends that she is given the clarity to see that she has choices, and though this knowledge increases her sense of guilt to a nearly unbearable level, she does finally take responsibility for her actions, and chooses to make reparations rather than continue on her destructive path.
The Soul Beast is a 122,151 word fantasy of epic scope, with a decidedly Gothic feel. While its vistas reach from the snowy mountain peaks of Seraphina's temple, to the harsh desert surrounding the empire's capital, the novel maintains a constricting tension as Aurilanus is lead through its increasingly dark narrative, one which brings the adult Aurilanus finally face-to-face with Seraphina's master and the Devil himself. While its primary theme is on temptation and choice, in its explanations of the religion of the Coronites and the cult of the Chaotics, the novel also explores the foundation of religion, and religion's interface with spirituality.