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Bride of the Tornado

Chicago Tribune Top Ten Best Books of 2023

The Guardian Best Sci-Fi, Fantasy and Horror (September '23)

New Scientist Best Sci-Fi (August '23)

SciFiNow Best Sci-Fi (August '23)

Bookriot's 10 Don't-Miss Horror Novels (August '23)

Powell's Bookstore Pick of the Month (August '23)

2024 American Book Fest Best Book Award for Visionary Fiction

"A genre-bending horror thriller that grapples with adolescent desire and existential dread... Gooey, gory, and frightening, Kennedy's latest will appeal to fans of coming-of-age horror."—Booklist

"An eerie, surrealist twist on the American Midwest, highlighting everything unusual about small-town living... the focus on creating a desolate and strange atmosphere pays off. Horror fans who value ambiance over jump scares will want to check this out."—Publishers Weekly

"A Lynchian sense of creeping nastiness, rooted in the way small-town life can be stifling, pervades a novel that, as its various plot strands come together, has a whirlwind energy that's hard to resist. Four stars."—SFX Magazine

"Strap yourselves in for a super-storm of psycho-sexual intensity: American gothic, full-blown horror, wrapped up in an adolescent coming-of-age tale... Don’t try to understand, just get swept up and enjoy the ride."—Daily Mail

Get 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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Thursday, May 15, 2025
Reading at the Speculative Literature Foundation's "Deep Dish" series at After-Words Bookstore, 23 E Illinois St., Chicago. 6 pm.

Friday, May 30, 2025
The TACOMA, WA screening of the 14th annual 90-Second Newbery Film Festival. At Grant Center for the Expressive Arts (2510 N 11th St.). Hosted by me and Tacoma's own Doug Mackey. 5 pm. Get your FREE tickets here.

Wednesday, June 25, 2025
Doing a "Make A 90-Second Newbery Movie In One Day!" workshop at the Budlong Woods branch of the Chicago Public Library (5630 N Lincoln Ave, Chicago). Free and open to kids. 3-5 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.

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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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Secrets of Story Episode 31: How Does Irony Work In Stories?

September 1, 2021

My adult speculative thriller, Dare to Know, is coming out on September 14! Pre-order now, available wherever books are sold. Want to make it special? Order your own signed and personalized copy from Chicago’s Book Cellar bookstore.

Want to learn more about Dare to Know? Shelf Awareness did a great review and interview with me here.

Matt Bird and I are back with another episode of our Secrets of Story podcast. In this one, Matt lays out his theories of how to use irony effectively in your storytelling, and we talk about his ideas in the context of Casablanca, Blazing Saddles, and Mulan.

(Actually, Matt and I got into a hourlong and extremely contentious argument about Blazing Saddles and whether comedy ages well. But Matt cut all that out. Perhaps we’ll see that audio resurface someday as bonus content!)