JAMES KENNEDY

A whirl of trouble: the American author tells us about turning to horror

- Jonathan Wright

THE FIRST TIME HE SAW TWIN PEAKS, JAMES Kennedy immediately identified with the suburban eeriness that David Lynch had conjured up. "[My childhood world] seemed very well-manicured on the surface," he says, "but crazy stuff was going on." Not that Kennedy, busy playing Zork on his Atari 800, was necessarily too aware of this at the time.

Nevertheless, a sense of Lynchian menace occasionally manifested itself, as on one Fourth of July when Kennedy was in eighth grade. "I was sitting with this girl who I was interested in," he recalls. "It was at night and this guy just came lurching out of a house that was only 10 doors down from me with a gun. He was pointing it in our faces and said, 'There's some little people been threatening me?' I just kind of talked my way out of it and ran across the street to a house where there was a guy who was a Vietnam vet, a father of some friends of mine. He came out and got this guy in a headlock."

It wasn't an incident that resulted in any lasting trauma, and Kennedy insists that growing up in the Detroit suburb of Troy, he enjoyed "a completely idyllic, Norman Rockwell childhood". Nevertheless, life, he learnt, could be "normal, normal, normal, normal, normal and then some crazy thing happens" before just as suddenly returning to "normal, normal, normal, normal, normal again" as "the crazy thing gets metabolised".