The Two Things I Cut Out of My Own Book

On a Revolution, a Locked Room, and Why The Year of Shadows Had to Become The Anatomy of Shadows

6 September 2026 ~ 4 min read

The novel I have been writing for ten years has a new name. Readers of this page knew it as The Year of Shadows. It is now The Anatomy of Shadows, and I want to explain why, because the honest answer is not the one people expect.

It was not a marketing decision.

It was a confession.

Here is how the book began.

I am a composer, and for most of my adult life I have lived inside the music of Hector Berlioz — the Symphonie Fantastique, the Memoirs, the whole overheated, glorious year of 1830 when a doctor’s son who was supposed to be dissecting cadavers instead won the Prix de Rome, fell in love with an Irish actress he had never met, was jilted by a pianist whose mother preferred a piano manufacturer, and premiered a symphony that changed what an orchestra was for. I wrote that year first as a screenplay. Nobody wanted it. Berlioz, I was told, is too obscure.

Then I remembered a story I had loved since I was a boy: The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Edgar Allan Poe set the first detective story in Paris — a Paris he never saw. He dreamed of the city his whole life and never got there. And I thought: what if he had? What if the young Poe, disgraced, broke, traveling under a false name, had taken rooms in 1830 with a young medical student named Berlioz — and what if the impossible murders in the Rue Morgue had happened to him, in the year the symphony was written? That was the whole idea. Two young men who were nobody yet, and the year that made them.

So I wrote it. And then, over several years and two very good editors who wanted very different books, I let it drift. One editor wanted more of the women — and she was right, and Eleanor and Henriette became real people because of her. Another wanted something more literary and more inward. Draft by draft the book got better in a hundred ways and lost, without my quite noticing, the two things it had been built on. The July Revolution — the three days in July when Paris rose and threw out a king while Berlioz was locked in a room finishing his cantata — had shrunk to a paragraph. And the Rue Morgue murders, the case that was the reason I started the whole project, had been edited out entirely. I had a novel about Poe in Paris in which Poe never solved the Rue Morgue.

When I sat down this summer to read the manuscript cold, I could not defend it. Not as a story: the writing was fine. As a record. The book takes liberties — I move a jury, I compress two years of heartbreak into one, I borrow an audience from 1832 — and I own every one of them in the Historical Note at the back. But liberties are only forgivable if the frame is true, and the frame of 1830 is a revolution and a locked room. Without them the year was not the year. It was a pleasant season.

So I put them back. A prologue. Three chapters of July — barricades, the cockade (ribbon) a marketwoman pins on an American who had been raised to fear crowds, and the archive fires that burn a foreigner’s residency file to ash so that, on paper, he no longer exists. And three chapters in December in which a widow and her daughter are found butchered in a room locked from the inside, and the young man from Virginia does what he would one day give to a character named Dupin. The book grew by fifteen thousand words and became, at last, the book I had meant.

The title followed. The Year of Shadows had always been a slightly borrowed name — it belongs to another author’s novel, and I had known for a while that it would have to change. But the real reason is that the new book does something the old title did not describe. It takes a single year apart on the table. Poe in the dissection theatre. Eleanor Morel’s ledger of the city’s unexplained dead. Every tale and poem he would spend the rest of his life writing, traced back to the chapter where the year planted it. The book is an anatomy: the year of shadows, opened up to show where everything came from.

Ten years, more drafts than I will admit to, two editors, one cold read. It turns out I had the right book the first time. I just had to stop improving it long enough to put it back.

~ Liam

PS – if you’re curious about the note in between the two books, it reads: What is broken can still serve the light, reinforcing the idea of a book being restored rather than rewritten.