Tornado Day: An Evening w/ James Kennedy

Join us for a chat with James Kennedy, author of Dare to Know and Bride of the Tornado. We had the pleasure of talking with James for a virtual event a couple of years ago, and can't wait to reconnect in person.

ABOUT THE BOOK
“A powerfully weird, original tale that combines American folk horror with a surreal coming-of-age nightmare.”—The Guardian

Stephen King’s The Mist meets David Lynch’s Twin Peaks in this surreal, 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 fever dream of a novel reveals the mythbound madness at the heart of American life.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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.