Two Novels, One Composer

What My Novels Sound Like — and Why They Sound Nothing Alike

10 March 2026 ~ 5 min read

A composer hears two things when listening to an orchestra: the sound of the piece, and the architecture beneath it. The melody is what the audience follows. The architecture—the key, the voicing, the way silence is placed between phrases—is what makes the piece hold together. Two pieces can sound nothing alike and still share the same structural ear.

I wrote two very different novels. The Year of Shadows is literary historical fiction set in 1830s Paris—Edgar Allan Poe and Hector Berlioz, murder and music, gaslit streets and Gothic darkness. An Apology to the Cosmos is the first book of a fantasy trilogy set in Cork, Ireland—a cosmic janitor, a sentient nebula, the Devil in a wellness spa, and seventeen dimensions that refuse to behave. One ends in a graveyard. The other ends in a pub quiz.

People ask how the same person wrote both. Here’s the honest answer: they sound different because they are different. But they were composed by the same ear. And since a blog can only describe prose in the abstract for so long, let me show you what I mean.

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Here is a passage from The Year of Shadows. It’s August 1830, and Hector Berlioz has just been betrayed by his lover, Camille Moke, who left him for a wealthy piano manufacturer. Edgar Allan Poe—his roommate in my novel—decides to tell him a story on the carriage ride back to Paris.

Edgar began to speak, alternating between scribbling in his notebook and performing the scenes with theatrical intensity. His voice rose and fell like an incoming tide—powerful rushes followed by intimate whispers that drew Hector deeper into the dark fantasy. The carriage seemed to shrink around them, becoming a confessional booth where murderous fantasies took shape.

What Edgar narrates is a revenge fantasy he calls La Vengeance—an elaborate tale in which Hector disguises himself as a maid, infiltrates his rival’s château, and murders everyone before poisoning himself. It’s grotesque, theatrical, and deliberately over the top. Edgar performs it—acting out voices, springing up in the carriage, mimicking each character. And Hector listens, horrified and mesmerized in equal measure.

But the scene isn’t about revenge. It’s about what happens after the story ends:

Something stirred in Hector’s mind. Not murder—but music. Dark, discordant, terrible music. He could hear it now—the Dies irae emerging in the low brass, that ancient death chant he’d learned in the medical school chapel. Funeral bells tolling. The beloved’s theme twisted into a grotesque parody of itself.

“My God,” he breathed. “That’s it. That’s what’s been missing.”

“What do you mean?”

“My symphony. The final movement—a witches’ sabbath where love itself becomes corrupted. Where the beloved’s beautiful theme transforms into something monstrous.” His hands began moving, conducting an invisible orchestra. “The Dies irae woven throughout. Judgment Day. The death of love, the death of hope, the death of everything.”

Edgar smiled with deep satisfaction. “Then my tale has served its purpose.”

That’s the moment the Symphonie Fantastique is completed—not at a desk, not at a piano, but in a rattling carriage, born from a revenge story that a friend told to ease a broken heart. I wrote that scene because I believe the best art comes from collision—two minds, two disciplines, two kinds of darkness meeting and producing something neither could have made alone. The prose here is meant to feel like a slow build: the carriage shrinking, Edgar’s voice rising and falling like a tide, and then the sudden pivot from horror to creation. I wanted the reader to hear the symphony being born the same way Hector hears it—not as an idea, but as a sound that arrives fully formed.

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Now here is the opening of An Apology to the Cosmos:

Seán had only looked away for a moment. That was all it took. A single, minuscule, seemingly insignificant distraction—a lapse so brief it shouldn’t have mattered—but the universe has never been particularly forgiving about these things.

The screwdriver shouldn’t have been there.

It wasn’t even really a screwdriver, not in the traditional sense. It was an Abstract Tool—an object that existed halfway between metaphor and maintenance equipment—issued by the Bureau of Universal Stability for minor spacetime adjustments. It had no real weight, no real shape, and technically no real existence.

But, in Seán’s defense, it looked like a screwdriver—which, in hindsight, was a terrible design choice for something that manipulates reality. But that was bureaucracy for you—always finding new ways to make simple things unnecessarily difficult.

As it slipped from his fingers, the Abstract Tool didn’t fall so much as slice through dimensions. It carved a path through reality like a shooting star made of pure possibility, leaving ripples of distortion in its wake.

Somewhere in his obsidian office in Florence, the Devil paused mid-corruption, his perfect Windsor knot suddenly feeling too tight.

“Dad! Dad!” Chip burst through the door, acorns spilling from his pockets. “Something shiny just fell past the window! Can I keep it?”

“Not now,” Dale interrupted, straightening his eternally crooked tie. “We haven’t filed the proper paperwork for interdimensional object acquisition. According to section 666, paragraph—”

Meanwhile, the Abstract Tool continued its reality-bending descent until it found a small but terribly inconvenient wormhole. It hung in space for a fraction of a second longer than it should have, as if deciding what to do. Then it veered sharply left, cartwheeled twice, and plummeted neatly into the early moments of the Big Bang itself.

Seán swore.

Different world. Different century. Different everything. And yet—the same ear is at work. Both passages build through accumulation: detail layered on detail, the tension rising not through speed but through precision. Both use silence as a structural element—the white space before “Seán swore” works the same way the white space before “My God, that’s it” works. Both let comedy and gravity coexist on the same page. And both trust the reader to hear the shift when the music changes key.

The difference is register. The Year of Shadows is scored for strings and low brass—minor key, candlelit, intimate. An Apology to the Cosmos is scored for a full orchestra with the percussion section slightly drunk—major key, irreverent, cosmic. But if you listen past the instrumentation, the phrasing is the same. Short sentences after long ones. Fragments that land like rests in a musical score. A building rhythm that arrives somewhere unexpected.

That’s what it sounds like to write two novels with one ear. The stories are different. The worlds are different. The voice adapts. But the composer underneath—the one who hears rhythm before meaning, who places silence before noise, who knows that a screwdriver falling into the Big Bang and a symphony born in a rattling carriage are both stories about what happens when something slips—that composer doesn’t change.

If you’ve read this far, you’ve already heard both scores. I’ll let you decide if you can hear the same hand behind them.

— Liam