I’ve certainly let a lot of ideas fall through the cracks in the last 14 years. This project has been a long time in the making-you first started talking about it back in 2007. Keene and Vincent at NECON (the Northeastern Writers’ Conference) in 2015. In this joint interview with The Big Thrill, Vincent and Keene talk about the project’s winding path to publication, the role music has played in their creative processes, and why the project’s lengthy gestation was Stephen King’s fault (but not Paul Tremblay’s). (A signed, limited-edition hardcover run is forthcoming, exclusively available to members of the specialty press’s Collectors Club.) The project was originally conceived more than a decade ago, but fate (mostly in the form of Stephen King) conspired to keep it out of your TBR pile until this year, with Cemetery Dance’s surprise trade-paperback release in March. Though they’re wildly different in tone, style, and subject matter, the novellas of DISSONANT HARMONIES share a common genesis: each author’s story was inspired by a playlist created for him by the other writer. (The name refers to Nelson Mandela many people insist they remember the South African leader dying in prison in the 1980s even though he was released in 1990, served as the president of South Africa from ’94 to ’99, and died in 2013.) Short and savage, Keene’s tale of reality fraying at the edges is a devastating take on apocalyptic fiction that plays out entirely in the confines of a single motel room. Keene’s contribution, “The Motel at the End of the World,” centers on the Mandela effect, a shared false-memory phenomenon that causes significant slices of the population to remember something differently than how it occurred. Vincent’s slow-burn horror tale is heavy on atmosphere and suspense, leaning into the tropes and rhythms of crime fiction as it builds to a satisfyingly unhinged conclusion.
When one of the brothers makes a bizarre discovery in the basement of an apartment building, they realize they aren’t dealing with anything as mundane as a serial killer. In Vincent’s novella, “The Dead of Winter,” two brothers investigate a series of unexplained disappearances as a brutal snowstorm bears down on their already-isolated hometown.
It’s a perfect metaphor for a new duology of novellas from horror stalwarts Bev Vincent and Brian Keene, presented in a single volume from Cemetery Dance. In music, “dissonant harmonies” are unstable combinations of pitches that often leave the listener feeling tense or uneasy.
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