Corpus Lupus

Corpus Lupus is a novel by Phil Geusz, written in 1999 and 2000, published by The Raccoon's Bookshelf; it is now published and distributed by Legion Printing. Most readers consider it Geusz's darkest and most disturbing work to date.

Plot Synopsis
Corpus Lupus is poor Latin for "the body of a wolf", and is the story of Detective Larry Highridge. Highridge is a werewolf and a homicide detective living in a high-tech world where magic is a fact of life.

Unfortunately the only controllable form of magic in this universe is necromancy. More specifically, the only way to get a spell to work is to torture and mutilate someone to death. Since the fact that necromancy works is widely understood and acknowledged, there has to be government involvement in the field. In turn, this requires the licensing of individuals to practice the dark art. These individuals, who make up the Guild of Necromancers, thus spend their entire working lives legally torturing human beings to death.

As a homicide detective, Highridge must work closely with the Guild and over time his life becomes as stained and twisted as those of the necromancers themselves.

Origin
Corpus Lupus began as a novella about Detective Highridge's introduction to the Guild via a particularly nasty multiple child-murder. More ideas soon followed, however, and Geusz added two more novellas to the plot arc: Pit Wolf and Loop Garou, making the novel more like a collection of three connected short stories.

Pit is about an incompetent amateur sorcerer who killed himself and his family, causing a major upset in the Planes of Reality. Loop Garou is about a series of murders in Chicago.

Each of these tales is about much more than solving the murder cases they are built around. Far more important are Highridge's personal experiences and the awful, terrible things he must go through in order to perform his job.

Geusz also once wrote a fourth tale in this series, Liecanthrope, but decided that it did not fit in with the plot-arc defined by the other three.