Interview with James Kennedy

James Kennedy is the author of the horror thriller Bride of the Tornado, which the Guardian named one of the “Best Recent Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Novels” in September 2023. James‘s previous books include the sci-fi novel Dare to Know, which was named by the Times Saturday Review as a Best Sci-Fi Book of 2021, and the young adult fantasy The Order of Odd-Fish. In addition, James is the founder of the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival, an annual video contest in which kid filmmakers create short movies that tell the entire stories of Newbery-winning books in about 90 seconds. He also hosts the Secrets of Story podcast with Matt Bird. James lives in Chicago.

Cesar Toscano
How would you describe the process of transitioning from a sci-fi novel to horror novel as a writer? Were there any challenges or opportunities you got to explore?

James Kennedy
Looking back, I just realized that all my books have elements of horror in them. Indeed, my tendency toward horror has only become more pronounced the more I write. So maybe it’s less about a transition, and more about me learning who I really am as a writer!

My first novel was a young-adult fantasy called The Order of Odd-Fish, which was about a seemingly ordinary girl who enters a wonderland-like world, only to realize she’s secretly the one foretold to destroy it. There’s a lot of humor and whimsy in it (talking cockroach butlers! goofy weapons like the “apology gun”!), but there’s a fair amount of horror in it too, so much so that many reviewers characterized aspects of the book as “dark,” more than a few dubbed it as “Lovecraftian,” and a couple of reviewers even called it “depraved.” Yep, that’s what you want out of a children’s book: depraved!

My next novel was for adults, the sci-fi Dare to Know. The premise is that there’s a company that can predict with perfect accuracy the exact time and date that you die. Our washed-up hero is a salesman for the company, where there’s just one rule: you can’t look up your own death-date. At a desperate low point, though, our hero does look himself up, and discovers he had died twenty-three minutes ago. The algorithm is never wrong, but he’s not a ghost, so why does the math fail only for him? This sets him on a quest across America and through his own memories, a journey that is less straight science fiction and more freaky horror—a phantasmagoria of haunted video games, an occult alternative history of science, the evil side of startup culture, an ancient curse from pre-Columbian America, and dark conspiracy theories about Top 40 music.

My latest novel, Bride of the Tornado, is the most straight-up horror book that I’ve written. It’s about a small town that, once a generation, is engulfed by strangely sentient tornadoes that threaten the town with annihilation, and a boy known as “the tornado killer” who has the ability to punch, wrestle, and destroy those tornadoes. The main character is a girl in the town who is fascinated with the tornado killer, and she discovers clues that indicate a secret connection between the two of them. She and the tornado killer enter into a dangerous relationship that brings them into confrontation with the town’s secret tornado cult—a cult that has nightmarish plans for them both.

I think the challenge and opportunity of writing Bride of the Tornado was grappling with our current unsettling realities, many of which might explain why horror is such a big deal right now: small-town madness, cult-like conformity, women losing bodily autonomy, increasingly dangerous weather, and our furtive desire to be dominated by something massive and irrational. Even though Bride of the Tornado is set in a vague 1980s, I feel it’s relevant to our current queasy and arguably horrifying present. 

CT
How did you come up with the idea of your novel “Dare to Know”? Is there a great story that created this great concept, was it inspired by interests, or did you just pop out one day randomly?

JK
All three, actually! I’m a fan of emotional sci-fi stories that are built around an odd speculative concept, like how the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind explores the idea of being able to delete your painful memories, or how Being John Malkovich has fun with a technology that allows you to occupy the body and consciousness of someone else. 

As for where Dare to Know in particular came from: for some reason, I’ve always wanted to write a novel about a burnt-out salesman. I could feel his voice, but I didn’t know what story to put him in. I’m not a natural salesman myself—I remember the mortifying childhood experience of going door-to-door to sell mail-order meats and cheeses for school fundraisers—but I’m interested in the salesman personality type. 

When I wrote that book I was having changing feelings about technology. In my youth, computers felt like wondrous tools for exploration, creativity, and liberation. I loved creating primitive video games on my Atari 800XL, I was intrigued by the passionate handmade feel of the kooky early internet, and I enjoyed working as a computer programmer. But lately—really, since the rise of social media—the world of information technology has started to feel like a cursed realm of aggression, distraction, and surveillance. I wanted to explore my new icky feelings about computers. What happens when our souls are reduced to exploitable data? Specifically, what if a company could sell you the one of the most intimate and unknowable things about you—the exact time and date of your own death?

I was a physics major in college, so this premise gave me a fun opportunity to create a fake physics for this technology, exploring its cosmic dimensions as well as connecting it up with odd episodes in the history of science itself.

All these ideas came together in a way that did just “pop out one day randomly,” as you said in your question. I was standing in the park across the street from my house, watching my daughters play with the kind of distracted, exhausted boredom that many have as a new parent, and I had a flash of inspiration that connected my burnt-out salesman, my distaste for the current vibe of computers, and my own background in physics. And the idea dropped neatly into that Charlie Kaufman genre of stories that I love, that I mentioned in the movies above.

CT
I noticed in your novel “Dare to Know” you used a present tense style. It’s not as common for novels to be written in the present tense today, why did you decide this tense and what was the process like of going about writing the manuscript with it?

JK
I’m not a huge fan of using the present tense unless there’s a compelling reason. Both The Order of Odd-Fish and Bride of the Tornado are both written in traditional past tense. I feel that telling an entire story in present tense has the unfortunate effect of making a novel read like a screenplay. Appropriate uses exist, of course. I feel the technique works best for cinematic stories with lots of physical action, especially YA books—for instance, it was the correct choice for The Hunger Games to be written in present tense. 

As for Dare to Know, it’s actually not exclusively written in the present tense! The main story is in the present tense, true, but much of the story is told in flashback, which is written in the past tense. I thought that for clarity’s sake, it would help to keep the various timelines more distinct by having the “contemporary” story be in present tense, and the numerous “flashback” episodes in past tense.

Once I decided to use the present tense, it was like getting behind the wheel of a very fast and fun-to-drive car. There were many exhilarating maneuvers you can do with it. But I also feel that present-tense prose is exhausting to read in large doses. Also, there are some deep psychological places where it can’t go, certain ruminative opportunities that it can’t grasp. That’s another reason why I wrote it in a mixture of past and present tense. As always, pick the right tool for the job.

CT
Why do you typically write speculative fiction? Is there a personal motivation or is it simply what is fun for you as a writer?

JK
I do read lots of speculative fiction, but that’s not all I read. Indeed, most of what I read isn’t speculative fiction. But it seems that all the story ideas I have, and everything that I write, is speculative fiction. I’ve learned that you really can’t pick what kind of writer you’re going to be. You just start writing, and that’s who you are.

It reminds me of Philip Pullman’s book The Golden Compass and its sequels, which explores a world in which every human has a “daemon”—an exterior physical representation of their soul that follows them around in the form of an animal of some kind. When you’re a child, the daemon often shapeshifts between different animals, but during puberty your daemon settles into one particular animal form. Some people are surprised by the animal their daemon settles into, some are upset by it, some are quite inconvenienced (if your daemon is a fish, you’re committed to a life on the sea whether you like it or not). But you just have to accept that that’s who you are. Same with who you are as a writer.

And maybe the fact that I intuitively reached for an example from a speculative work like The Golden Compass can explain why I like to write in speculative fiction. Speculative fiction allows for vivid, striking opportunities for expressing familiar human truths in new ways. We’ve all pined for the lover who got away, and there a plenty of realistic stories about that, but the one that forever sticks in my head is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. There are many realistic stories about accepting the totality of life and the choices you make even though you know it will also contain heartbreak and loss, but Arrival and Everything Everywhere All At Once both embody that truth in fresh and unforgettable ways. As a child, I had a vague idea that something Christian was happening in the Chronicles of Narnia, but I definitely preferred reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to going to church. And A Wrinkle in Time takes Meg’s typical teenage loneliness, desire for recognition, and capacity for love and blows them up to cosmic proportions—making us feel them all the more deeply. I do a podcast called The Secrets of Story with my friend Matt Bird, and one of his insights is “realism is how it is, genre is how it feels.” To go back to a story I referred to above, teenagers are constantly pitted against each other in standardized tests and the competition to get into college—a struggle so high-stakes it often feels like life-or-death, just as it is in The Hunger Games. Again: realism is how it is, genre is how it feels. Speculative fiction can, through its genre trappings, often express the emotional reality of some universal experiences better than a strictly realistic novel, no matter how carefully calculated and finely observed that realistic novel is. So that’s why I write those kinds of stories, I guess.