James Kennedy, author of The Order Of Odd-Fish
Chicago's cultural curators go to bat for the art they love
Welcome to Defend Your Taste, wherein Chicago's cultural curators go to bat for the art they love. Next up: local author James Kennedy, who penned last year's fantastic fantasy The Order Of Odd-Fish. The book follows Jo Larouche, a girl leading a quasi-normal life who discovers she comes from a strange place called Eldritch City—where disputes are settled by duels upon flying ostriches, and members of the secret Order Of Odd-Fish climb inside giant worms and play them like musical instruments. The plot also deals with a dark secret about Jo that's shielded from her since birth, which strikes us as very Harry Potter-esque. So Decider cornered Kennedy before his Bookslut reading tonight (and Book Cellar reading tomorrow) to discuss said similarities, and figure out how the hell young adult fantasy stands out in a post-Harry Potter world.
Decider: Harry Potter is a boy with a mysterious past, who discovers a fantastical place where everybody knows about him. Similarly, Jo—
James Kennedy: I think that’s re-stating Harry Potter in a way that makes it more like Odd-Fish than it actually is. Harry Potter is a celebrity in the world of Hogwarts and magic, and if anybody really knew who Jo is—and actually nobody does—they would turn against her, just as they did when she was a baby. So if anything, it’s a reversal of the Harry Potter plot. She’s not the savior of Eldritch City; she’s the one who could possibly destroy it.
D: Still, both books center around kids who grow up learning about their pasts.
JK: Nobody asks Martin Amis, “Why do you write about adults?” I don’t, this is just like my default mode of writing. There’s no further explanation. This is the kind of book I like to write.
D: Were you familiar with Harry Potter before you started writing?
JK: Yeah, and I think Harry Potter opened up new territory in young adult fantasy. Before, there were no books between, say, The Chronicles of Narnia and J.R.R. Tolkien that filled in that gap—maybe that’s one of the reasons why it was so popular. I also think audiences now, for young adult literature, are much smarter. Kids are exposed to so many stories from a much earlier age. They are more impatient with clichés than we were growing up, or our parents were. So [Harry Potter] opened up this new territory for more sophisticated and longer stories. I was kind of working on a version of The Order Of Odd-Fish at the time that Harry Potter came out. And I remember this freeing feeling—it was just like, “Oh, I can do that? You mean, write a 400-page book? I can have a lot of characters?” I was modeling myself before on something like Roald Dahl.
D: Because of what you said, that J.K. Rowling opened the door to a wider audience for this kind of fantasy, is it harder to get recognized? Or easier?
JK: Now, the field is swamped with fantasy stuff. The signal-to-noise ratio is all out of whack. But [sales] have been getting better lately because I did this blog post—which I did not mean to be read by that many people—in which I mentioned Neil Gaiman. I made a joke about him; I said he was two millimeters tall, and his books were written by bees. Somehow within two hours, he picked it up and linked to it. Suddenly I had 8,000 people on my blog—there are usually only 100 people—and the sales started going up. Also, I made fun of the American Library Association, so all these librarians were reading it, and it was getting on librarian blogs. And so they were buying it.
D: So basically your strategy is to make fun of things, and then people will come to your website and buy your book.
JK: It wasn’t even a strategy. I thought I would write this story for me and my friends. It would be disingenuous to say that I wouldn’t want that kind of attention, but I didn’t expect it. After it happened, I realized I couldn’t have planned it any better with who I chose to whimsically insult. I went to New York a couple weeks ago, and I met up with my agent and editor for the first time in the flesh, who said, “If you had run that past us, we would’ve told you not to put that up.”
D: Do you just not care?
JK: Well, no because it was a whimsical insult that nobody could possibly take offense to. Like, I said that one of them lived in my fingernails and was kind of a parasite that I’d caught in Puerto Rico, and she was always talking to me through my fingernails and undermining me. Like, what is she gonna say? “Oh, you got me”?
D: Is there a part of the whole recent fantasy craze that you don’t like?
JK: The funny thing is, I don’t read a lot of fantasy. On one hand, [Harry Potter] allowed people to write longer books that are more sophisticated. On the other, it allowed books to come out that are just bloated. And not well-edited—they’re not long because they need to be, but just because they can be. Here’s something: You have fantasy, and it’s this genre, and people think, “If I’m gonna write fantasy, I’m just gonna have this kind of [sighs] medieval world. There’s some swords, and there’s some wizards.” They don’t use the freedom of fantasy to make something that’s truly new and weird, and I wanted to do something that used the freedoms that are given to fantasy, but not use any of the conventional tropes of fantasy, like a dragon.
D: Is fantasy a sophisticated person’s genre?
JK: No. Number one, there’s more room for everybody nowadays. You can do something that’s weirder and more complicated simply because there’s going to be an audience for it. There’s not like a broad audience. Like, Saul Bellow would put out a book in the 1960s, and it would be on the best-seller list for months and months. That kind of broad, highbrow-middlebrow culture doesn’t really exist anymore. All these tiny little subcultures do exist and thrive.
D: So there’s no Dane Cook of fantasy writing.
JK: Are you saying Dane Cook is the Saul Bellow of comedy?
Here's a photo of a cake one intrepid fan baked, based on a key scene in Odd-Fish:
