After a detective makes love to his client, she tries to get him to kill her husband. The detective declines, but agrees to continue trailing the husband. Unfortunately, once the detective follows the husband on a business trip to Florida, he finds himself being drawn into the husband's web -- and craving a new power, which can only be gotten through sex.

The Raw Essentials of Human Sexuality begins with a detective making love to his young, beautiful, client. A month earlier, she had hired him to trail her husband, but they had quickly become lovers. When the client asks him to kill her husband, the detective begins to realize the wife was using him: trying to get him to commit an act where she would be the only beneficiary. The detective declines her offer, but when she proposes to double his fee if he continues trailing the husband, he agrees. It seems like a simple enough proposition, but when he follows the husband on a business trip to Florida, his simple plan becomes more complicated when he and the husband actually sit down to talk. The husband tells him a story, about his youth in the South, and the detective finds himself remembering a horror story his mother used to tell him -- about their kin fleeing from their demonic master the day the Union won the Civil War. Instinctively terrified, the detective runs from the husband. Just when he thinks he has escaped, a creature appears out of nowhere. He finds himself being devoured by darkness; and in the morning, he awakes feeling drained. When he looks in the mirror, it is as if years have passed. He looks old. To get back his youth, he finds he must submit himself to the husband's will. He follows along for a while, but when the husband tells him to kill the wife, and the detective finds himself in the same place he had started. To reclaim his soul, he must navigate the various demands and threats -- and the tightening noose of the law.