Books

Book 2: The Devouring God
★★★★☆ on Amazon
It’s been three years since Tohru Takuda and his reluctant band of monster hunters defeated the Drowning God. Now, a mysterious artifact is driving innocents in Southern Japan to flay their friends alive, and the grisly murders turn Takuda’s world upside down.  Disheartened and impoverished, his rag-tag team is caught between the police, the bloodthirsty murderers, and forces conspiring to harness the artifact’s horrible powers to poison the entire nation.
And all the while, he must watch his back, because the most dangerous killer may be lurking among his own men.

Book 3: The Fox Bride
★★★★½ on Amazon
A return to the world of The Drowning God. In the months following the events of The Devouring God, The Lotus Café is an oasis of calm in Japan for a young foreigner, until he realizes that this quaint little diner is the base of operations for a unique side business. Better get that order to-go…

Book 4: The Wine Ghost
★★★★★ on Amazon
A journey of recovery, redemption, and the terrible freedom of the open road. Part travelogue, part deep dive into the belly of alcoholism and madness, this book also touches the weird world of Kendley’s paranormal series for HarperCollins, The Drowning God Tales.

“If Japan, with its lively American expatriate community, resembles Paris in the Roaring Twenties, then James Kendley is its Hemingway – but with greater technical proficiency, a larger spirit, a broader emotional repertoire, and an incomparably richer imagination.”

— Bizarro fabulist Tom Bradley

Book 5: This Light in Thrall
NEW! on Amazon
A tantalizing “found document” glimpse of battles against a shadowy, murderous cabal waging a secret war, a war that rages to this day. This Light in Thrall, one of a trio of tales written in preparation for the thrilling conclusion of The Drowning God Tales, reveals the enemy’s horrifying strengths and hidden weaknesses.

VERSO RECTO
★★★★★ on Amazon
Danse Macabre-era favorites in a pandemic-era collection of Kendley specialties: bright verse, polished prose, dark whimsy, and sheer tomfoolery, including everything from an English sonnet to prose vignettes to blank verse to satirical short fiction:
• Trade Surplus
• The Professor Gets Lucky
• This Kind Nepenthe
• Azalea Trail
• The Algerian Witch’s Abandoned Brood
• Burger Meridian
• Broad Summer Last

In the Red
★★★★½ on Amazon
A Danse Macabre-era 1930s-style Weird Fiction novella winding its way through the hidden world of dark worship, taking a prudish preacher on a pilgrimage of madness from the Chattahoochee River Valley to Damascus to Carcosa itself.
Trigger warnings for gore and cosmic-horror-scale nihilism, but still leaning more toward classic Weird than modern splatterpunk. Really, three peppers max, if horror were on a Szechuan restaurant menu.

The Mooncalf
★★★★☆ on Amazon
Just when a Victorian country gentleman thinks he has bred monstrosity out of his cattle, he finds the Outer Darkness much closer to home.
This, my first professional fiction sale, is also the anchor of a print collection with Hammer & Anvil Books, but it deserves its own separate life here.

MONSTRO
NEW! on Amazon
You think you know the classic monsters, but you’ve never met them like this:

• a strange, hungry child brought in after curfew
• a werewolf with a problem even worse than lycanthropy
• Ol’ Uncle Zagnut’s unique and delicious solution to the undead holocaust
• a sentient spaceship possessed by the Outer Dark
• Jersey girl meets phantom suicide in old Kyoto (and every freakin’ word is true)
• a beautiful ghost trapped in a glass box – and only the failed actor responsible for her death can end her suffering