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Bride of the Tornado

Coming August 15, 2023. Pre-order here!

A young woman's secretive Midwestern town is engulfed by a mysterious plague of tornadoes every generation–and she must escape it before it claims her.

Stephen King’s The Mist meets David Lynch’s Twin Peaks in this inventive, mind-bending horror-thriller.

In a small town tucked away in the midwestern corn fields, the adults whisper about Tornado Day. Our narrator, a high school sophomore, has never heard this phrase but she soon discovers its terrible meaning: a plague of sentient tornadoes is coming to destroy them.

The only thing that stands between the town and total annihilation is a teen boy known as the tornado killer. Drawn to this enigmatic boy, our narrator senses an unnatural connection between them. But the adults are hiding a secret about the origins of the tornadoes and the true nature of the tornado killer—and our narrator must escape before the primeval power that binds them all comes to claim her.

Audaciously conceived and steeped in existential dread, this genre-defying novel reveals the mythbound madness at the heart of American life.

(Pre-order a signed copy!)

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DARE TO KNOW

Indie Next List Pick (September '21)

The Times Best Book of 2021

"Worth the cover price for sheer insolence alone... Essential reading for the gathering dark." —The Times Saturday Review

"A voraciously readable page-turner of a novel, part creepypasta, part thought-experiment." —Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother and Radicalized

"Explores questions of free will, psychology and human history in a fascinating, compulsively readable thriller."—The Guardian

“An entertainingly mind-bending read.”—Financial Times

"Audaciously clever and well written... [a] superb piece of storytelling: vivid, thought provoking and unsettling. After you finish it you’ll want to go back to the start and read it again." —SFX Magazine

"A razor-smart sci-fi corporate noir nightmare. Dare to Know is what happens when Willy Loman sees through the Matrix. A heartbreaking, time-bending, galactic mindbender delivered in the mordantly funny clip of a doomed antihero." —Daniel Kraus, co-author of The Shape of Water

(Get a signed copy!)

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"Hilarious . . . Readers with a finely tuned sense of the absurd are going to adore the Technicolor ride."
—Booklist

"Fantasy done to a clever, grotesque, nonsensical turn." —Chicago Sun-Times

"A work of mischievous imagination and outrageous invention." —Time Out Chicago

"An extraordinary and delightfully weird romp that’s one part China Mieville, one part Lemony Snicket, with trace amounts of Madeline L’Engle and Roald Dahl . . . Kennedy has filled 400+ pages with a series of strange turn-ups and adventures that grow progressively more outlandish and funny, such that when you think he’s surely run out of runway and must crash, he finds new, unsuspected weirdness to explore.” —Cory Doctorow, author of Little Brother, For The Win, and co-editor of Boing Boing

Email: kennedyjames@gmail.com

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Saturday, March 25, 2023
The BOSTON screening for the 12th annual 90-Second Newbery Film Festival! At the Rabb Auditorium at the Boston Public Library Central Library in Copley Square (700 Boylston Street). Co-hosted by me and author Rebecca Mahoney (The Valley and the Flood and The Memory Eater). Bookselling on-site by Trident Booksellers & Cafe. 3 pm. Get your FREE tickets here.

Saturday, April 15, 2023
The BROOKLYN screening for the 12th annual 90-Second Newbery Film Festival! At the Dweck Auditorium at the Brooklyn Public Library (10 Grand Army Plaza). Co-hosted by me and Chris Grabenstein (Mr. Lemoncello's Library, The Smartest Kid in the Universe, and more) with special guest Newbery honoree Rita Williams-Garcia (One Crazy Summer and more). 1 pm. Get your FREE tickets here.

Sunday, April 16, 2023
The TRENTON, NJ screening for the 12th annual 90-Second Newbery Film Festival! At the New Jersey State Museum Auditorium (205 West State Street, Trenton, NJ). Co-hosted by me and Chris Grabenstein (Mr. Lemoncello's Library, The Smartest Kid in the Universe, and more). 3 pm. Get your FREE tickets here.

Saturday, April 22, 2023
The SAN ANTONIO, TX screening for the 12th annual 90-Second Newbery Film Festival! At the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts Will Naylor Smith Riverwalk Plaza. Co-hosted by me and Nikki Loftin (Wish Girl, Nightingale's Nest, and more). On-site bookselling by The Twig. Made possible by our partners at Bexar County Digital Library Bibliotech and the Hidalgo Foundation through the generosity of H-E-B Texas Grocery. 11 am - 12 pm. Get your FREE tickets here.

Tuesday, August 15, 2023
The release party of my horror-thriller Bride of the Tornado at Chicago's own Exile in Bookville (Fine Arts Building, 410 S. Michigan Ave, Second Floor). I'll be in conversation with author and partner-in-crime Keir Graff!

Tuesday, September 19, 2023
Author Kathleen Rooney and I are teaming up to do an event at The Book Stall (811 Elm Street, Winnetka, IL) for my new horror-thriller Bride of the Tornado and Kathleen's new true-story historical novel From Dust to Stardust. 6:30 pm.

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Speculative Thrillers That Blur The Line Between Physics and Philosophy. An article I wrote for Crimereads.com in which I talk about "metaphysical technology" in the works of Isaac Asimov, Cixin Liu, Tanizaki Junichiro, Kelly Link, Colson Whitehead, Thomas Ligotti, Angela Carter, Susannah Clarke, and even obscurities like T.L Sherred and text adventure writer Brian Moriarty (anyone else remember Infocom's Trinity?)

Interview for the Chicago Review of Books. Devi Bhaduri interviews me about our changing emotional relationship to technology, my "Elf Theory" of friendship, and how L. Ron Hubbard stole the girlfriend (and life savings) of one of the people who inspired Dare to Know.

Interview for Shelf Awareness. Paul Dinh-McCrillis reviews Dare To Know and interviews me. Find out which parts of the book are inspired by Del Close's death-visions, a baffling cab ride I took with my wife, and why I dread December 19, 2046!

Interview for the Japanese Consulate's E-Japan Journal. Austin Gilkeson interviews me about my time in the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program (JET) from 2004-2006. We discuss how living in Japan inspired me for The Order of Odd-Fish and Dare To Know, plus we talk about my experiences on the 88 Temples of Shikoku Pilgrimage and the time a Japanese schoolboy sang Avril Lavigne's "Complicated" to me on the train.

Read All Recent Press

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The 90-Second Newbery Film Festival. I founded a film festival in which kid filmmakers create weird short movies that tell the entire stories of Newbery-winning books in about 90 seconds. Now in its 6th year, it screens annually in 14 cities: New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and many others! The movies the kids create are weird, funny, and impressive. Learn more about the film festival here.

The Secrets of Story Podcast. I host a podcast with Matt Bird, the author of a book and blog called The Secrets of Story, in which we discuss (okay, argue about) advice for novelists and screenwriters.

The Classroom Guide to The Order of Odd-Fish. I've put together a 44-page Teacher's Guide / curriculum for Odd-Fish! It's a treasure trove of creative project ideas, discussion questions, chapter worksheets, and further resources. It also features fan art by enthusiastic teen readers of Odd-Fish. (This art was featured in a fan art gallery show in Chicago in April 2010.) You can download the teacher's guide for free here.

It's a mixtape for The Order of Odd-Fish. Listen to a stream of the songs I chose for an imaginary "movie soundtrack" for Odd-Fish, and read why I chose them. Lots of different stuff: French ye-ye, Kinshasa street bands, pseudo-classical, puzzling blippity-bloopity music, and more.

I used to be in a band called Brilliant Pebbles. We had been variously described as "melodramatic video game music," "moon-man opera," and "gypsy sex metal." It's over now, but I loved being in this band.

Email: kennedyjames [at] gmail [dot] com
Twitter: @iamjameskennedy

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The Order of Odd-Fish on Goodreads
Dare to Know on Goodreads

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90-Second Newberys from Sidwell Friends School, including a Claymation Island of the Blue Dolphins

October 28, 2011

Just a week until the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival screening in New York City, November 5! All details about the film festival are here, including information on the Chicago screening November 16.

I had the pleasure of receiving eleven, count ’em, eleven 90-Second Newbery films from Becky Farnum’s sixth-grade class at the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C. This gold mine included one of my favorite films so far, check it out above: a Claymation version of Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell, which won the Newbery Medal in 1961.

It’s one of the bloodiest Claymation videos I’ve ever seen! Set to the music of Debussy, no less! I found it nothing less than hypnotic, especially when the dogs dismember the guy. The movements put me in the mind of a 1980s video game. This will for sure be shown in the screenings in New York and Chicago. Great job!

But that’s not all I got from Sidwell Friends School! There are ten more great adaptations too. I can’t fit them all into one blog post, so I made their own page where you can see them all. Click here to watch all eleven 90-Second Newbery films from Sidwell Friends School.

Thanks a million, Sidwell Friends! Superlative job!