Bledsoe is a Tennessee native who now works from his home in Mount Horeb.
It’s a fiction writer’s job to create a new world. Alex Bledsoe’s fiction does just that — with the added bonus of a soundtrack that drives the plot.
The Mount Horeb-based author has finished his fifth book for the Tufa series, which features modern-day fairies, vampires and a “sword jockey.” All five titles are based on songs by folk singer Jennifer Goree, who Bledsoe found online while searching the term “Appalachian soul.” The fifth title, Gather Her Round, was released in March by Tor Books. Publishers Weekly called the book “an atmospheric tale” and said Bledsoe “comfortably inhabits the space where rural fantasy and magic realism overlap and makes it his own.”
The Tufa stories are set in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, Bledsoe’s home state. The Tufa are a dark-haired mysterious people who have lived in fictional Cloud County since before European settlers arrived. No one knows who they are, or where they came from. Their power and magic come in the songs that have been passed down for generations.
With the blend of current culture and a little bit of mystery, Bledsoe’s Tufa tales are genre fiction for people who don’t read genre fiction. He plays with the notion of being disconnected from the world but unable to avoid being pulled into it.
“That’s the overriding theme: When you can’t hide anymore, what do you do?” Bledsoe says.
Gather Her Round deals with the universal theme of jealousy, a love triangle with the added twist of menacing feral hogs. There are brutal deaths, but are they murders? Once again, the Tufa have to let outsiders into their world to get answers.
Bledsoe had wanted to write about hidden people in the modern world, and he drew inspiration from the true story of Iraqi soldier Jessica Lynch’s rescue. The first Tufa book, The Hum and the Shiver, deals with a young female soldier’s return home as a military hero. Four more books followed as the Tufa world melds with other worlds, including those of rock ‘n’ roll and musical theater. Despite the mystery and evil that lurk, it’s a utopian society — in a culture that keeps to itself, there’s a live-and-let-live attitude where women are respected and gay people are accepted.
“There is a huge body of literature about mountain folk and how bad they are,” Bledsoe says. “That they’re dishonest, uneducated, inbred, all that. So if you’re going into that you have to either embrace that or react against it.”
In addition to basing titles on songs by Goree, Bledsoe excerpts other musicians’ lyrics. Bledsoe introduced many of those artists before they played sets at South Carolina’s Enchanted Chalice Renaissance Festival in 2015. He found kindred spirits in Tuatha Dea, a band that bills itself as “Celtic tribal gypsy rock.” He included them in a book, and the band in turn recorded an entire album, Tufa Tales: Appalachian Fae. Bledsoe had a bit role in the band’s video for “Wisp of a Thing.”
In September, Bledsoe will be part of a “Tufa Tour” hosted by Tuatha Dea. The weekend bus tour winds through the Appalachian Mountains near Gatlinburg, Tennessee, with book and music events.
“It doesn’t get much more flattering than that,” Bledsoe says.
Alex Bledsoe will discuss his work and sign books on June 3, 1:30 p.m., at the Alicia Ashman Library, 733 N. High Point Road.
