Brace yourselves, friends.
Never have I ever read a weirder book than Bride of the Tornado by James Kennedy.

I picked up Bride of the Tornado [Buy Bookshop Amazon ] because I was moderating a panel with James at C2E2 and I like to read as many books by my panelists as possible. I’m not a huge horror reader, so I was wholly unprepared for the chaos of this book (or the chaos of the author, but more on that later).

Bride of the Tornado is a first person POV novel where our main character is a teenage girl in a bizarro town that’s surrounded by tornados. I can’t tell you her name because many of the characters are unnamed, which feels pretty unusual on its own. The kids of the town all have to dress old school on what they learn is Tornado Day, and a boy is brought in inside a box. He’s the tornado killer and no one can touch him or he won’t be pure. If he isn’t pure, he won’t be able to protect the town from the tornados. But the girl feels some odd connection to this boy and keeps seeking him out. Oh, and of course, the adults are all keeping some major secrets.

This book is so bizzare, it’s entertaining for the majority of the story. There are pieces of dead tornado killers in necklaces, touching a tornado’s brain, and some other oddities. Things get a little too strange during the last third for me to keep suspended belief and roll with this story. Toward the end, I kept wondering if I had missed something because all I could think was WTF.

However, as bizzare as Bride of the Tornado is, I still get entertainment out of it. I’ve come to really enjoy sharing about it with customers asking for something unique. So, if you like unusual takes, give this one a try. It’s not my jam, but it might be yours.

And a note about the author, as promised. James showed up to our panel dressed as a tornado. We were all floored. He stayed in that tornado costume all day, wrapping up the day with a LiteraryHype interview while Brandon Sanderson signed books behind us. An appropriately bizzaro moment. James is a quirky and nice dude, who had my entire team bursting with laughter.