The Brooklyn Rail

James Kennedy’s depraved, hilarious, and genre-bending Midwestern horror coming-of-age novel Bride of the Tornado features voracious, sentient, animalic tornadoes wreaking havoc on a town less wholesome than first meets the eye. Kennedy himself is a bit of a tornado in the best possible sense, spinning with seemingly endless enthusiasm and energy around Chicago’s literary community and beyond. This past September, he and I got to do a joint conversation about both of our new novels at Chicago-area independent book-selling stalwart The Book Stall. Because I am a classic over-preparer, I came up with far more questions than any two people could possibly answer in a tight one-hour program about two books. So I invited him to indulge me in answering all of my questions in one fell swoop here, and he agreed. It was a pleasure to extend our conversation, discussing how “realism is how it is, genre is how it feels,” secretly binge-reading Anne Tyler, and protecting your darlings, as well as why sometimes it’s best not to name your protagonist, not to mention how the next 90-Second Newbery Film Festival will be screening at the Brooklyn Public Library on March 2, 2024.

Kathleen Rooney (Rail): Every little kid I have ever met has been obsessed with tornadoes. Here, you have an entire town share that obsession. What is it about tornadoes that makes them compelling and what’s your personal relationship to them?

James Kennedy: Children are correct: tornadoes are awesome. Pulverizing, godlike columns of spinning air? Skyscraper-sized monsters of the prairie that materialize and vanish in the blink of an eye, tearing apart entire towns? That’s metal!

When I was a kid growing up in Michigan, we’d occasionally have a “tornado watch.” The tornado alarms would sound, and my family would run down to the basement to wait it out. Nothing too destructive ever really happened.

Still—even a mild experience can leave an impression. And at what other time was my entire family obliged to hide together from some alien power? I had a Picture Bible that I read a lot as a child, and tornadoes felt to me like Old Testament stuff, like the Angel of Death passing over our house. (Melodramatic kid.)

Tornadoes are overwhelming, unanswerable. And capricious: a tornado might lay waste to an entire neighborhood, but leave one house mysteriously untouched. Or a tornado might kill one person, but throw another person for a mile—unharmed. This combination of dominance, inscrutability, and unpredictability is great story fodder.

A tornado is also compelling because it’s a peculiarly American monster. Seventy-five percent of tornadoes in the world happen in the United States—about a thousand per year. Still, although tornadoes lurk here and there in our national mythology, with a tall-tale character like Pecos Bill lassoing a tornado to ride it around, or the tornadoes of The Wizard of Oz or Twister—tornadoes still feel underrepresented in American culture. Maybe it's a coastal vs. flyover thing?

Well, I’m doing my part for tornado visibility with Bride of the Tornado. And I hear that Twister 2 will be released in 2024. Maybe tornadoes are having a moment.

Rail: The simple definition of a tornado according to the National Weather Service is “a violently rotating column of air touching the ground, usually attached to the base of a thunderstorm.” The simple definition of the pathetic fallacy is “the attribution of human feelings and responses to the natural world.” Here, you combine those two things to create your monster. (Side note: I love when you describe the tornadoes as “putting on a show, pirouetting like mammoth demented ballerinas.”) How did you do that? You have a degree in physics, so did that come into play? Did you have to do a bunch of meteorological research or did you just go for it?

Kennedy: Yeah, my tornadoes in Bride of the Tornado aren’t scientifically accurate, but rather sentient-but-inhuman monsters metaphysically entangled with the people in a small town. One of the characters in the book is a teenaged boy who is a “tornado killer”—that is, he can punch, kick, and generally beat the shit out of a tornado. I’m definitely not going for meteorological veracity here.

That’s why, as for research, I set the science aside and instead read lots of first-person accounts of what it felt like to be caught up in a tornado. The important thing for this story was the subjective experience of a tornado, not the strict physics of it. To encounter a tornado is to be brought face-to-face with something magnificent and dangerous and beyond the normal scale of things. Those emotions are part of what I wanted to write about.

And you’re right, the book has quite a bit of “attribution of human feelings and responses to the natural world”—but I’m embarrassed to say I had never heard of the “pathetic fallacy” before! I thought you were being mean at first. “Why is Kathleen calling me pathetic and fallacious? I thought we were friends!”

Rail: The book is often compared to David Lynch, which feels apt because it’s this unexpected tension of a wholesome setting that appears serene on the surface, but with off-kilter horror lurking beneath. What does horror or not-quite-realism let you bring to your writing that straight-up realism doesn’t?

Kennedy: Do our own experiences always conform to the demands of straight-up realism? Maybe not. Perhaps the reason David Lynch’s stuff resonates isn’t because he offers an unrealistic escape, but because polite realism can’t always capture the real.

My friend Matt Bird once wrote “Drama is how it is, genre is how it feels.” That is, literary realism is a fine goal, but it’s not the only way to be truthful. When you write a genre piece, like horror or romance or action, you’re given an opportunity to tell the truth about how certain experiences feel in a way that realism never can. As Matt wrote about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “In reality, high school problems only felt like the end of the world, but here they really were the end of the world. If it felt like a guy was ripping your heart out, here he really would try … This may not be how it happened, but it sure is how we remember it.”

No one worldview can satisfy us all the time. I remember in high school I secretly read all of my mother’s Anne Tyler books (as though I was doing something illicit). I loved them because they were straightforward grown-up literary-realist, the opposite of the sci-fi and fantasy and experimental stuff I would normally read. Reading my mom’s Anne Tyler books satisfied a part of me that, say, watching Twin Peaks didn’t. But Twin Peaks satisfied a part of me that Anne Tyler couldn’t.

We pass so much of our lives in a dreamy state. We are subject to passions that are so ferocious that we do things that shock ourselves, that make us feel like we don’t know who we are. Our selves are fragmented and incoherent. Our emotional experience of the world is sometimes too boring and repetitive, or too overblown and tasteless, to fit into the categories of literary realism. It requires a different mode to express those truths.

Rail: The book is also very funny. There are so many hilarious moments, but my favorite is probably when the protagonist’s sister Cecilia is arguing with Deacon Terry, who runs their church camp, about the correct pronunciation of “orgies.” I actually laughed out loud. How did you decide to include comedy?

Kennedy: My editor wanted to take that part out! I had to dig my heels in to keep it! That’s why I’m suspicious of various bits of off-the-shelf writerly advice, like the old saw, “Kill your darlings.” I’m like, what? You should be so lucky to get a darling in the first place! If you’re blessed with a true darling, then protect that fucking darling!

The part you’re talking about happens during a serious funeral scene. Our protagonist and all her friends are feeling miserable and guilty. But you can’t hit the same note too many times in a scene, or it begins to lose its power. To bring those characters’ misery into sharper relief, I briefly digressed into a memory of when they were more lighthearted and goofy.

I like it when a book has a little bit of everything. It’s rewarding to hit many registers: funny, horrifying, dreamy, romantic, social-comedy, introspective, even action-movie. You brought up David Lynch earlier—people remember Twin Peaks as weird, but there were also straightforward comedic parts, teen-drama parts, and even soap opera parts.

Anyway, comedy and horror are closely related. Both aim to elicit involuntary physical responses: a laugh, a shudder. It’s no accident that Jordan Peele, now known as a horror guy, got his start in comedy.

Rail: Why did you set it in the Midwest? Aside from the obvious reason that the Midwest is the primary turf of tornados?

Kennedy: I’ve spent most of my life in the Midwest, so I know it. I wrote an article recently in which I recommend my “[Top] Five Midwestern Horror Novels,” and in it I talk about how horror set in the Midwest feels different than horror set in other regions—different than the witchiness of New England, the overripe feel of Southern Gothic, the dead-eyed psychosis of California.

The Midwest, especially to outsiders, feels punishingly flat and featureless. You can feel how there is nowhere to hide. Back in the nineteenth century there was a thing called “prairie madness”—people would go crazy from the relentless monotony, the extreme isolation. Pioneers traveling for months in their Little House on the Prairie covered wagons, seeing the same landscape day after day, and finally settling in a random piece of that flatness, and losing their minds.

But horrifying and beautiful and world-changing things happen in flat places where you can see a long way. Judaism, Christianity, Islam—all those religions started up in the desert. When there’s emptiness all around you, when you can see for miles and you feel exposed, it puts your mind in a different place. 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 becomes particularly intense when the horror starts. When you learn that you can’t rely on them—indeed, that they have it in for you—that’s nightmarish.

Rail: Dream sequences feature prominently in the book, but they’re not—for a lot of people—so easy to write. Often the protagonist struggles to differentiate her dreams from reality, thinking “I was dreaming but it didn’t feel like a dream.” How did you strike that balance between what’s happening when she’s asleep versus when she’s awake and how did you convey her confusion without confusing the reader?

Kennedy: Like all of us, our protagonist does more than struggle to differentiate dreams from reality—she actively and intentionally blurs the line. We all do, because we belong in a dreamy state. It’s our natural condition. We spend so much of our lives dreaming, not only when we’re asleep, but also dreaming our memories, dreaming of what might happen in the future, dreaming our fantasies. If we have spare time, do we spend it in a sober analysis of reality? No, we immerse ourselves in the dreams of others, through books, TV, and movies. When waking life gets a little too real, we rush to intoxicate ourselves to get back in that dreamy state. I think it’s important to confuse the reader a little bit because we intentionally confuse ourselves all the time. T.S. Eliot said in the Four Quartets “Humankind cannot bear very much reality,” but that only sounds snarky out of context. It’s more like saying “Humankind cannot eat very many stones.” We’re not made for it. We’re not accurate reality-processing machines. We’re made for dreaming. We’re really good at it. When I wrote Bride of the Tornado I didn’t worry too much about differentiating the protagonist’s dreams from reality because it’s all of a piece.

Rail: The names of the people at your protagonist’s school are evocative: “Cuthbert Monks,” “Ned Barlow,” “Jimmy Switz,” “Lisa Stubenberger,” “Sadie Hughes,” and “Danielle Lund.” What is it about the names of people in high school that’s so captivating and how do you settle on character names?

Kennedy: There is something totemic about high school names, isn’t there? Nowadays I meet people and I immediately forget their names; sometimes I struggle to remember the names of people I knew in college. But I will never forget the names of people I knew when I was a teenager, not only the names of people I was close to like “Brian Westerberg” or “Robyn Sadowski,” but people I only knew a little like “Derek Grundy” or “Hillary Kaye Throckmorton.” Real names have a flinty oddness to them that is really hard to fake.

But we are writers, so fake it we must. When I made up names for the high schoolers in this book, I liked to include something a little off-putting or uncommon—but not too weird—to make them shine the way high school names shine in our own memories.

Rail: Why set this not just in a town, but in a high school milieu?

Kennedy: High school is a high-stakes time. Your identity is up for grabs in a way that it isn’t later on. You’re discovering and making decisions about what music you’re going to listen to, how you’re going to dress, what people you’re going to hang out with. That sets you on a particular path. Later on, that music will be the music you feel nostalgic about, and those clothes will be your default way of dressing, and those friends will turn out to be the people you’re dealing with for the rest of your life. But the flip side of that is, you’re also experimenting in high school. You’re trying on and discarding different personae, different friends, different ways of thinking. You haven’t committed to anything yet, so it’s fluid and exciting. In high school, I remember hearing the advice “Be Yourself!” and thinking: I don’t know how to do that, there’s no true “myself” to be, I’m still figuring out who “myself” is! Now that I’m older it’s quite easy to “be myself,” but that’s only because the decisions and commitments have been made. When you’re younger it really feels like it could go in many different directions, and that’s catnip for a storyteller.

At the beginning of the novel, the protagonist feels she knows who she is, but her identity gets broken and erased over the course of the story. She does win her personhood back by the end, but it’s a close shave. Just like high school.

Speaking of high school, Bride of the Tornado has some YA fiction DNA in it. My first book was a young adult fantasy, and so I thought I would continue writing in a similar mode. But when I showed an early version of Bride of the Tornado to my agent, he said, “Um, this is definitely not a YA book,” and he was right. When I shook off the manuscript’s YA origins and committed to writing in an adult mode—in terms of the intensity of the horror, the reality-slippage, the formal weirdness—the book came into its own.

Rail: The name of the narrator of Bride of the Tornado is never revealed. At one point, the protagonist thinks “Mr. Z said my name. My name sounded bad in his mouth,” but you never tell us what he says. Why not?

Kennedy: There are special effects that you can get by not naming your main character. I think it builds a kind of intimacy and emotional complicity with the reader. If I were to say her name is “Eileen Castleberry,” then you could hold her at arm’s length and say to yourself, “Well, that’s just a total Eileen Castleberry thing to do.” But if she doesn’t have a name, you can’t distance yourself from her as readily, and maybe you feel what she feels more acutely.

Similarly, the tornado killer that she falls in love with doesn’t get a name other than “the tornado killer.” At a certain romantic moment, we are told that the tornado killer says her name—but even then, her name is withheld from the reader. That makes the tornado killer saying her name an act of intimacy, just as Mr. Z saying her name is an act of violation.

This is kind of played out in other ways, too—our no-name protagonist reads and identifies with the Emily Dickinson poem “I’m nobody! Who are you?” and indeed it turns out the town is secretly in conspiracy to make her “nobody”—to erase her identity and appropriate her body for their own ends. So not disclosing her name isn’t just me being obnoxious, it’s a thematic thing—I promise!

By the way, my editor hates this tendency of mine. My last book Dare to Know had a nameless narrator too. After I turned in Bride of the Tornado, I began to tell her about my next project, and she stopped me and said, “But your main character for this new one has a name, right?” I told her that no, he didn’t, and she laughed, and then calmly stated, “I’m going to murder you.”

Look, I’m not going to have a nameless protagonist with every book in my career. But for these three, I want to. Maybe they can eventually market them as the Nameless Trilogy.

Rail: Throughout the book, there are a lot of mysterious locket necklaces and also tattoos—do you think there’ll be merch? Will you sell lockets and tattoos? Will you or other people, do you think, get a tattoo based on the book?

Kennedy: I appreciate tattoos on others. A bookseller in San Francisco even got a tattoo of a line from my first book The Order of Odd-Fish (“It is my job to be wrong in new and exciting ways”). That’s a beautiful and momentous thing for a writer to experience!

Tattoos on others are cool and attractive. But for me? No. I don’t know why I feel so strongly about this, but I don’t ever want a tattoo. Commitment issues?

Rail: New York Magazine does that feature “What [Insert Celebrity Name Here] Can’t Live Without,” and they recently did one for James Kennedy, the DJ and star of the reality show Vanderpump Rules. Among other things, his list includes Kiehl’s Midnight Recovery Omega-Rich Cloud Cream, Mumba High Fidelity Concert Earplugs, and the EMart 10-inch Selfie Ring Light. Tell me, what can’t James Kennedy the writer live without?

Kennedy: I’ll tell you this: I can do without all these false James Kennedys that are running around the world.

I’ve never seen Vanderpump Rules but I tried to watch a YouTube compilation of “James Kennedy’s Most Outrageous Moments!” and it was unbearable.

There’s another James Kennedy whom I sometimes get lumped in with—a right-wing Florida preacher who wrote books with titles like What If America Were a Christian Nation Again? and What’s Wrong with Same-Sex Marriage? (according to him, plenty). I sometimes find this James Kennedy listed next to me in the “Other Titles By” sections in online booksellers. I don’t want to limit my audience, but somebody who dug How Would Jesus Vote? might not be totally into Bride of the Tornado.

There’s also a Welsh rock-and-roller named James Kennedy. I wish him well.

Rail: One last thing—you started the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival, an annual video contest for kid film makers that tell the stories of Newbery Medal books in a minute-and-a-half. Can you tell us how this came to be and why you love doing it?

Kennedy: Like everyone else, my best ideas come to me when I’m daydreaming. I was stuck at work listening to some presentation and my mind was wandering. I had just reread A Wrinkle in Time, and for some reason I idly tried to write a script that summed up the plot in a minute or so. Then I thought: wouldn’t it be fun to try to shoot this? I’d never made a movie before, but I got my niece and nephew together with their friends and we shot it in a day. I took another few days to edit it in iMovie. I published it, with a call for more “90-Second Newberys,” and I was astonished at the response—more than a hundred thousand views in just a few weeks!

That kicked off the 90-Second Newbery Film Festival—an annual video contest I run in which kid filmmakers create short movies that tell the entire stories of Newbery Medal- or Honor-winning books. (The 90-second time limit isn’t strictly enforced, and adult help is okay.) Since 2011, we’ve been showing the best kid-made movies in packed-house special gala screenings in libraries, museums, and theaters across the country. These free events are full-scale stage shows with skits and commentary and music that honors the kids’ movies, hosted by me and other children’s authors.

The 90-Second Newbery screens annually in New York City, Chicago, Boston, San Antonio, Tacoma, Ogden (UT), and Rochester (NY). We’ve also screened in Minneapolis, San Francisco, Oakland, CA, Portland, OR, Salt Lake City, Detroit, Asheville, NC, Salem, OR, Boulder, CO…. The list goes on. It’s a lot of fun.

We now get hundreds of movie submissions per year. I write a positive, encouraging, and detailed review of every movie I get on the 90-Second Newbery website. These movies often have a creative twist—think Charlotte’s Web reimagined as a horror movie, or The Tale of Despereaux done in the style of the musical Les Misérables, or Mr. Popper’s Penguins done in stop-motion animation! (You can see some of the best entries here.)

The film festival is for kid filmmakers, but again, adult help is okay! If you want to learn more about it, or even make a movie for it, just mosey on over to 90secondnewbery.com.