Magic, Mystery and Music:
The World of Alex Bledsoe 

By Doug Moe

 
         Maybe it was at a state park outside Nashville when the line between fact and fantasy blurred for good for Mount Horeb author Alex Bledsoe.
         What happened that day in 2013 at the Montgomery Bell State Park in Burns, Tennessee, might easily have been a scene in one of Bledsoe’s acclaimed “Tufa” novels, which feature a mysterious people by that name who live in the Tennessee mountains.
         Except it really happened.
         Exactly what transpired I will get to momentarily, other than to say it gave me goosebumps when I heard about it. Bledsoe is good at that, just as he is good at getting starred – rave – reviews from book industry publications for novels like The Sword-Edged Blonde (Publishers Weekly) and The Hum and the Shiver (Kirkus Reviews).
         Bledsoe will join me at Mystery to Me September 16 at 7 p.m. to chat about his career and his newly published Tufa novel, Chapel of Ease, which is both a continuation of the series and a bit of departure. The author said his goal was to give regular readers what they expect while also freshening things up.
         For now, back to that park in Tennessee.
         Bledsoe was a presenter at the Pagan Unity Festival, a four-day event in May 2013 that promised authors, music, food and rituals.
         Bledsoe wasn’t that excited about the music. He figured it for New Age mellow, not his thing. He was kicking back in his cabin when from the pavilion below he heard the thunderous roar of heavy drums. Intrigued, he walked down to investigate.
         “It was one of the great experiences of my life,” Bledsoe said.
         What he encountered was an eight-piece ensemble band that mixed Celtic and Appalachian sounds into an intoxicating witches brew. Bledsoe was riveted. His Tufa novels had always been musically-themed – “the music ties them all together,” he said – and here was a band that might have been reading over his shoulder as he wrote. The band’s name, Tuatha Dea, was drawn from Irish mythology, which was also the inspiration for Bledsoe’s naming his fictional people the Tufa. It was eerie.
         The next day, Bledsoe sought out the band’s leader, Danny Mullikin, introduced himself, and gave the musician a copy of “The Hum and the Shiver,” the first Tufa novel. Mullikin handed over a Tuatha Dea CD. A friendship was forged.
         “Danny and I couldn’t believe the synchronicity,” Bledsoe said.
         For his part, Mullikin told a reporter that reading the novel gave him chills: “It felt like somehow the characterizations had kind of rolled over without any of us knowing of the other’s existence.” Tuatha Dea subsequently recorded an album inspired by the Tufa novels.
         Reading, writing and music were passions of Bledsoe’s growing up in West Tennessee. He got hooked on “Star Trek” TV reruns and began reading the novels written to tie-in with the syndication success of the series. Meanwhile, there was an AM station out of Memphis with a good signal and a mixed format that allowed him to sample a variety of music. By high school, Bledsoe was writing his own science fiction and fantasy stories, knowing he had found his calling, if not how to make a living at it.
         He worked a series of journalism jobs, landing in Madison a dozen years ago. The relationship that brought him to the area ended, but Bledsoe stayed, meeting the woman he would marry.
         He kept writing, and found himself returning again and again to a story that had been in his head since high school, a mix of fantasy and Raymond Chandler noir, sorcery and murder.
         “I must have done 50 drafts,” Bledsoe said.
         A later one got him an agent, and the agent found a publisher for The Sword-Edged Blonde, which put Bledsoe on the map when it was published in 2007, Publishers Weekly calling the novel “stylish and self-assured.”
         There have been a number of books since, and at some point Bledsoe began to think about a story his father had told him about growing up in East Tennessee, and a real-life group of isolated Appalachians known as the Melungeons.
         Bledsoe liked the fictional possibilities that might spring from such a group. “So I made up my own,” he said, and the Tufa were born.
         Chapel of Ease is his fourth Tufa novel. “The easiest book I’ve written,” he said, as well as the first Tufa story to be told in the first person. It opens in New York, where a theatrical musical directed by a man of Tufa heritage is about to premiere. Mysterious events ensue, someone dies, and the scene shifts to Appalachia.
         Cue the drums, and hold on.
 

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