The Collected Souls

The Collected Souls has the makings of an epic fantasy novel. Tess, a college student from our world, is swept up into a conflict that has traveled across the multiverse between a mysterious man known primarily as the Keeper and a woman called the Collector. The Collector has been traveling from world to world, gathering up souls. The Keeper has devoted himself to stopping her.

Tess is the next soul the Collector wants.

There are some chapters where The Collected Souls nearly delivers on that promise of an epic fantasy. In others, it becomes a more intimate, tender novel, both about the connection between Tess and the Keeper and about the trauma they both carry from their pasts. These chapters are gentler, and their tone bleeds into the others, softening them and bringing the scope down from something covering multiple worlds to something covering two people, with the multiverse serving as nothing more than a backdrop.

This is also the sort of novel where labels have power both to help and to define. Terms like cyclothymia, autism, bisexual, and aroace are used to define both Tess and the Keeper, and each one of them has a heavy weight behind it. Some will find them welcoming. Others will feel less certain of them.

Those terms sum up what made the book falter for me, though I paused less over what they represent than the terms themselves. Cyclothyma is a highly clinical term; aroace is modern in a different way, coming from the queer community. The latter feels appropriate coming from Tess, a young woman from our world, but it and its weight feel out of place in a fantasy novel. Cyclothymia was an odder addition, as the one who introduced the term was the Keeper, who has traveled through many different worlds to reach Tess.

Both of them are words that feel deeply grounded in our reality. For the most part, so does the book. The Keeper and Tess feel more or less real, but the multiverse as a whole feels distant, even when the threat to it is repeatedly mentioned. Richer descriptions might have helped to bring more life to the more fantastical parts of the book, but the main difficulty is that the fantasy is not the main point of the story. It only serves as a backdrop for a story about recovering from trauma and finding acceptance. A reader’s enjoyment of the book will depend greatly on what they want to receive from it.