James Kennedy will appear at the HORRORPALOOZA! event at After-Words Bookstore (23 E. Illinois Street), Sunday, October 29, at 5pm, with fellow horror authors Cynthia Pelayo and Julia Fine and Chicago author and ghost-lore expert Adam Selzer. Complete information and free RSVP here.
James Kennedy made several stops along his way to becoming a writer. He had a lifelong desire to share stories, but set it aside to pursue a physics degree and science career, play guitar, move to Japan twice, dabble in improv, and hold down gigs as a software engineer and junior high science teacher. In time, Kennedy dusted off his pen and began writing anew. He's turned out three novels so far: The Order of Odd-Fish (2008), Dare to Know (2021), and his most recent release, Bride of the Tornado. Horror doesn’t quite communicate the full scope of Kennedy’s latest book—a paranormal Gothic coming-of-age thriller involving sentient homicidal tornados, among other things—but it comes close. Currently, he lives in Chicago with his wife and two daughters. We talked by email about horror, his latest book, and introducing kids to filmmaking.
What brought you to horror writing?
That’s a good question. And it made me realize that, while Bride of the Tornado is my first straight-up horror novel, all of my books have had a horror aspect.
My YA fantasy The Order of Odd-Fish had enough scary and gross things in it that it was described as "depraved" by reviewers from both the School Library Journal and Voice of Youth Advocates (maybe not the best look for a kids' writer). My follow-up, the sci-fi mind-bender Dare to Know, was described in many reviews as “nightmarish." Frankly, parts of it are scarier than Bride of the Tornado.
So maybe nothing “brought” me to horror writing. I was already there, and now I have come into full flower at last.
Was there any particular author or book or situation that inspired you as a young horror writer? Who/what inspires you now?
The first truly scary book I read was in sixth grade. Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. Bradbury is at his best when he takes the things he loves—in that book it’s carefree boyhood, small-town Midwestern life, and traveling carnivals—and makes them menacing in an almost Lynchian way. I remember being particularly freaked out by the scene where the two kid heroes are hiding from the carnival’s evil ringleader in the library stacks.
Another scary book that affected me early on is The Dark Tower—not the 4,000-page Stephen King series (I haven’t read it), but rather an unfinished novel by C.S. Lewis that I found in a collection of his more minor works. The Dark Tower is a controversial work. Some claim it’s a forgery, which helps add to its queasy atmosphere, because while some aspects of it feel very C.S. Lewis-ish, there is a sexual darkness and grotesque body horror you wouldn’t expect from the jolly, hearty author of the Narnia books. It’s an unfinished manuscript with no proper resolution, which caused the story to linger more in my mind than if it had a proper ending.
Nowadays we’re in a horror boom, and there is lots of excellent new horror out there. One of my favorites lately has been Dan Chaon’s Ill Will. I’m late to this particular party—the book came out in 2017, and I only read it this year—but it’s a great example of Midwestern horror. Chaon really nails the ghastly feeling of the bleak flatlands, the charmless suburbs, the conflict-avoidance and inarticulateness of the various characters who are sleepwalking into a monstrous but undefined fate. In true Midwestern fashion, it’s about what is not talked about, what is not seen, what is not remembered—and how those silent things manifest themselves, with a narrator so unreliable he is unreliable even to himself.
I don’t want to spoil Ill Will with a synopsis. Just go read it. I loved this book.
Talk about your latest book, Bride of the Tornado. What differentiates it from other horror novels?
I'm pretty sure my book is the only one with monstrous sentient tornadoes.
And I have to ask: why is that? After all, a tornado is a uniquely American monster. Indeed, 75% of tornadoes in the world happen in the United States, about a thousand per year. And what a stupendous villain a tornado makes: a pulverizing, godlike column of spinning air! A skyscraper-sized predator of the prairie that can appear and vanish in the space of minutes, demolishing everything it touches!
It’s also the perfect monster to haunt the flat American Midwest. In the old days there was a thing called “prairie madness.” People would go crazy from the monotony, the isolation. Pioneers traveling for months in their covered wagons, seeing the same empty plains day after day, finally settling in a random piece of that flatness, and losing their minds.
And then suddenly, roaring into that horizontal world: something supernaturally vertical, an air-monster devouring and wrecking. It’s a contradiction of the landscape. You can’t argue with a tornado, you can’t stop it. Nature has the upper hand, and it doesn’t need to give you reasons. A tornado will destroy an entire neighborhood but leave one house unaccountably untouched. A tornado might kill you, or throw you for a mile, or rip off your clothes. It’s capricious.
Bride of the Tornado is about one of those small Midwestern towns that maybe has quietly lost its mind. A town with secrets intimately bound up in the tornadoes that seem to threaten it. It’s about a tornado killer—a boy with the power to punch, kick, and wrestle tornadoes into submission. And a girl who is fascinated by the tornado killer from afar, and tries to find out more about him. She learns about how they are deeply linked, and the horrifying things the town has planned for them both.
Bride of the Tornado has some far-out metaphysical horror, but it also has a certain kind of social horror, similar to the horror of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. When you’re isolated in a small town in the middle of nowhere, and the people around you are the only people you have to rely on—that’s unnerving. It becomes particularly nightmarish when you learn that you can’t rely on those neighbors, and that they secretly have it in for you.
What are you working on right now?
Oooh, I’m sorry, I must keep that secret! Too many times I’ve made the mistake of talking about what I’m working on. I’ve found that if I blab about what I’m working on too early, it dissipates the built-up private energy that I need to actually finish the thing. You’ll have to wait!
Are there any questions I didn’t ask that you wish I had asked?
Yes! For the past 13 years I’ve been running something I founded called “The 90-Second Newbery Film Festival.” It’s an annual video contest in which kid filmmakers create short movies that tell the stories of Newbery-winning books in about 90 seconds. Weird takes are encouraged: Charlotte’s Web in the style of a horror movie, for instance, or A Wrinkle in Time done as a musical. Every year we have big gala screenings of the best of these kid-made movies in cities all over the US, hosted by me and other children’s authors—in big cities like New York, Boston, and San Antonio, as well as smaller towns like Rochester, New York; Ogden, Utah; and Tacoma, Washington, And yes, right here in Chicago!
If you have or know a kid who is interested in filmmaking, this is a wonderful project (adult help is okay, by the way). The national deadline for movie submissions is January 26, 2024. You can learn more about the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival here.
And just in time for the spooky season, here’s that horror version of Charlotte’s Web I mentioned above, made by some kids from the Schaumburg Township District Library a few years ago.
Also, save the date. On March 9, 2024, we’ll be screening the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival at the Harold Washington Library Center downtown, hosted by me and fellow kids’ author Mary Winn Heider (The Stupendous Switcheroo and more). I promise it will be weird and wonderful!
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