Humans Don't Have Horns

This book won’t work for everyone. It wasn’t written for everyone.

❤️‍🔥 Love spice, banter & demon princes who don’t know they’re in trouble?

Meet Maren & Evander in “A Little Rough, A Little Ruined,” my original paranormal romance serial featuring a powerful midlife heroine and her demon prince.

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What Is This Book About?

Lian is a Puresoul princess raised to follow the True Religion, obey her father, and marry for politics—not love. She knows her place. She knows the rules. But that all ends the night her world burns down, and she’s taken by a horned warrior she was raised to fear.

Daton is a Cursed One. Branded, brutal, and known across the realm as The Butcher, he’s everything Lian was taught to hate. But in captivity, the lines start to blur. He doesn’t treat her like a hostage. He treats her like someone worth saving. And that might be more dangerous than any blade.

As Lian is dragged into a world of monsters, rebellion, and broken truths, she’s forced to question everything she thought she knew—about the Cursed Ones, about her own people, and about the man who was supposed to be her enemy.

There’s prophecy. There’s blood. There are creatures that eat humans whole. But beneath the chaos is a single, terrifying possibility:

What if the monster she was taught to fear… is the only person she can trust?

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You can only simmer for so long without boiling.

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Quick Facts

• Title and Author: “Humans Don’t Have Horns” by S.H. Schreiber

• HEA: Cliffhanger (in media res)

• Tropes: Enemies to lovers, slow burn, forbidden love, found family

• POV: FMC, MMC (only a few chapters), occasional side character POVs

• Trigger Warnings: Sexual assault (referenced, not perpetrated by the MMC), torture and abuse (shown), pregnancy through assault (referenced), substance abuse/addiction (shown), religious persecution (shown), violence against women (shown)

• Books in Series: 1 as of July 3rd, 2025

  • This book comes out on August 20 and is currently available for pre-order. I received a free ARC in exchange for an honest review, though I also purchased the book as a pre-order. We have to support indie authors!

• Overall Story: ★★★

• World Building: ★★★★

• Character Development: ★★★★

• Plot: ★★★★

• Pacing: ★★★

• Spice: 🌶️🌶️🌶️

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You can’t burn down the throne and still sit on it.

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My Take (Minor Spoilers)

Humans Don’t Have Horns isn’t the kind of book I typically reach for. Yes, it’s romantasy. Yes, the MMC is a powerful, horned warrior with a tragic past and a serious emotional repression problem, which is absolutely my type.

But the themes? They’re heavy. Sexual violence. Religious persecution. Systemic abuse. Survival under patriarchy so brutal it doesn’t feel dystopian; it feels familiar. These are things I usually avoid in my fiction.

However, I know (and love) the author. And when she told me why she wrote this book —because survivors don’t often see themselves in stories —I decided to give it a shot.

The story opens the night before Lian’s wedding with a sexual assault. It isn’t gratuitous or graphic, but it’s devastating. Her guard does nothing. Her society considers her ruined. When she’s kidnapped the next day by a horned Mongan warrior known as The Butcher, she assumes no one will come looking. And she’s right.

What follows is not a romance in the conventional sense. This isn’t “beauty softens the beast.” This is trauma stacked on trauma. This is a world where women are burned alive for surviving. Where child brides are married off at fifteen. Where warlords and priests compete to see who can dehumanize women faster. And Lian, a sheltered, obedient Puresoul princess raised to believe her worth depends on her purity, is thrown into the world with no weapons, no training, and no hope of rescue.

Daton—the MMC, our horned warrior—is not a safe man. He ties her to a war beast, denies her food, and doesn’t speak to her for days. When she begs him to kill her, he ignores her. He’s violent, cold, and emotionally shut down in the beginning. But as the story unfolds, so does he. His cruelty isn’t careless, it’s practiced. Built layer by layer from a life of grief, rage, and helplessness. He used to be a farmer. His wife was raped and murdered by nobles. His people were enslaved. He doesn’t trust kindness, and he doesn’t offer it unless he means it.

There are no shortcuts in their relationship. No magical healing sex. No fated mate bond. Just slow, brutal honesty between two people who have every reason not to trust each other, and who somehow, quietly, start to anyway.

This is an enemies-to-lovers, forced proximity, trauma-drenched survival romance. And while it does contain love, the story’s core is not about healing each other. It’s about learning that you were never broken to begin with.

The worldbuilding here is dense and brutal. Religions are weaponized. Class systems are deadly. People hunt the Cursed Ones for their horn extract, which grants immortality. You read one chapter from a hunter’s POV—a man who kills children to save his daughter—and you’re horrified, but you understand. That kind of moral complexity is baked into every layer of this world.

And the detail? Impeccable. The Cursed Ones have their own language. The Renyans and Aldonians have religious aesthetics tied to eye and hair color. Social status is a whole ecosystem. There’s a reason every time a new man enters a scene, you tense up. This story trains you to expect violence. Not because the author is exploiting trauma, but because that’s what this world does to women. That’s what our world has done, too.

This book isn’t trauma porn. It’s just honest. There’s almost always a threat of sexual violence, but it’s never sexy. And when rape is mentioned, it’s treated with weight. With anger. With survivor energy. The kind that says, this shouldn’t happen to anyone—and if it happened to you, it wasn’t your fault.

That’s what stuck with me the most. That message. That quiet, brutal truth that what happened to you does not make you monstrous. That survivors don’t need redemption, they need room to exist.

Now, the romance. It’s subtle. Sparse. There are two sex scenes, including one that ends in media res. This isn’t a fantasy about perfect orgasms. It’s about emotional intimacy between people who weren’t supposed to survive long enough to feel anything at all.

Would I have liked more Daton POV chapters? Yes. Absolutely. But what we do get shows a man who lets Lian come to him. Who backs off when he’s triggered. Who believes her, protects her, and eventually starts to want more for himself than vengeance.

This book is heavy. And dark. And difficult in places. But if you can handle the themes and want a story that does not look away from the violence or the softness that follows, this is a rare gem. Found family, morally complex characters, hard-won tenderness.

It won’t work for everyone.

But it wasn’t written for everyone.

And for the people who do see themselves in it? It might be the first time they feel seen at all.

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