PolyCorpse is a standalone novel set in a near future in which a powerful corporation, Saint Exxo, has developed the means to use energy from human souls, or “resonance”, to power the city of DehantaPolis. The main character, Theo, is a hunter of souls from the dead who have fled from their final obligation to the city; to willingly offer up their soul to Saint Exxo. Theo chases after these escapees, “the Disavowed”, on the Moor, a lawless, desolate and dangerous place that surrounds the city, where she harvests their souls using old-world 1980s music technology such as a synthesizer, tape deck and floppy disk drive. Each soul’s resonance needs a different musical combination to set it free, and Theo is quite the macabre DJ mixing in samples of ambient noise with her own voice to find the right combination for each corpse. She stores them on floppy disks and is paid by the big bad corporation on delivery.
We meet Theo after her own dying husband, Gin, has absconded, without leaving her a note, and is presumed dead somewhere on the Moor outside the city. She wants to find his body and set free his resonance, even though he had come to despise her profession and had become part of a rebel alliance that hoped for a better life outside the city:
Gin was someone who believed deeply in individual freedoms. The right to choose.
Woven throughout the early chapters of the book are flashbacks, which give the reader the backstory of Theo and Gin’s romance and life together. These help with the worldbuilding of this complicated yet intriguing world. We also see flashbacks of Theo and Sarika’s hedonistic friendship. Sarika is devoted to Theo, and their relationship acts as a contrast to that of Theo and Gin, whose relationship had soured well before Gin left. Poole does a wonderful job of painting these very different characters. I really enjoyed the friendship between Theo and Sarika and found it completely authentic. It took me back to my own London clubbing days with a group of friends. We witness Gin develop from being a caring, earnest nerd to an unhinged egomaniac, and Theo’s eventual realization that he is no longer the man she fell in love with helps to underscore the end of their relationship.
Once the stage is set, PolyCorpse picks up speed, and we see the girls going on a hunt outside the city for Gin’s body, hurtling from one daring adventure to the next. In Theo’s words, they experience:
Escapes and scraps and tuk-tuk chases and bomb threats and murder.
The novel becomes an exciting page turner, which I was not really expecting from the earlier chapters, but I thoroughly enjoyed the wild ride!
Along the way, Theo gets time to consider her career and begins to see what Gin found so distasteful:
Death had always infested her life, but it had been a stale presence. Long rotted and stagnant, she trudged through the dead far after their ultimate act of dying. She’d been nothing more than a grave robber, shrouded by the lapse of time, showing up only after the emotions of death had waned.
I found Poole’s writing style thoroughly immersive, and it was easy to see his experience from his day job as a narrative designer shining through – this guy knows how to write a smoothly connected series of adventures without losing momentum and keeping the reader engaged in the quieter moments.
I was sent an arc of PolyCorpse by the author – thank you! My review is honest, and my opinions are my own. PolyCorpse is due to be published on June 12th 2026.
More about Jarrett Poole can be found here.
