Irish fairy Appalachian hillbillies playing bluegrass
In the creation of his Tufa chronicles, Alex Bledsoe has perfected the art of carving out a niche for oneself in a rich and varied field. I don’t think I’ve ever come across a series so utterly confident in being distinctly what it is. The foundational conceit is this: uncountable millennia ago, some of the Tuatha Dé Danann (that’s Irish fairies, in case you didn’t know) got exiled from their homeland and ended up in the mountains of Appalachia. Time passed, they interbred with local humans, and also got really into Smoky Mountain Bluegrass music. Now, in the modern day, the Tufa community keep largely to themselves, living in rural Cloud County, Tennessee, in an odd sort of numinous hillbilly squalor. One minute they might be sprouting wings and flying off in the night winds; but the next morning they’re sitting in a ratty lawn chair in their underpants, throwing beer cans in the front yard of a double-wide trailer. Some of them might be playing transcendent music and singing fit to break your heart; others might be poaching deer or driving beat-up pick-up trucks, drinking straight bourbon out of a paper bag and looking to harass pretty girls. They live in Needsville, Tennessee, a town with a bed & breakfast, internet, grocery stores, schools, and a small tourism industry associated with its location in the Smoky Mountains—except sometimes outsiders can’t seem to find Needsville, and cell phone signals fail to get out. Bledsoe’s genius is in balancing these two worlds effortlessly, so that each feels as real as the other, both equally foundational parts of what and who the Tufa are.
Because the Tufa are, truly, a product of two worlds. After aeons in Appalachia, they are no longer Tuatha Dé Danann, and all of the books center around themes of duality and identity: How much ‘pure’ Tufa blood is necessary to retain whatever it is that makes a person truly Tufa? Sometimes it seems as if an unbroken bloodline is vital to preserve the magical heritage; other times the magic emerges from people who have been the product of multiple generations of couplings with humans. Sometimes it seems as if the Tufa magic derives from their Tuatha origins; other times it seems as if they’ve found a new source of power and identity in the entities that belong to the mountains of Tennessee. Some Tufa have been alive since their original arrival in Appalachia, exempt from the standard human relationship with time, remembering everything about who they once were; others have been born in America, and feel more tied to the human world around them than the supernatural roots of their ancestors.
The books in this series stand alone well, each telling a complete story, fully contained within its covers. The best ones lean into the duality of human and supernatural by bringing in an outsider to witness or engage in the events of the story. In the third, Long Black Curl, a rock star crashes a plane in Tennessee in the 1950s and wanders in the woods until a local hunter welcomes him to spend the evening by his campfire. When he walks out again, it is the 21st century. In the fourth, Chapel of Ease, a puzzled Broadway actor, dazzled by the talent of a new playwright in town, finds his way to Needsville, where he looks to solve an unanswered mystery embedded in the musical whose lead role he plays. In the last, The Fairies of Sadieville, we get a layered narrative construction: the main story has two graduate students arrive in Needsville to research an old movie hidden in a sealed film canister. They uncover the story of another town in Cloud County, from the first decades of the 20th century, which was, briefly, a coal town, until it disappeared from the face of the earth, from all remaining maps, and from everyone’s memory. The story of what happened in the coal town itself cycles back to a third embedded narrative, in which the Tufa themselves are new arrivals to North America, no longer the mysterious indigenes mystifying outsiders, but outsiders themselves, mystifying to the locals.
Structurally and thematically, these books are very strong. The vibes are rich and specific; and the setting is rock solid, fleshed out with recurring characters whose personalities are distinct and serve to make the town of Needsville feel real. And throughout each story, we have the running theme of music, the heart of what the Tufa are. They sing, they play; and though the fractures in their community run deep, all is temporarily set aside when they come together to make music. All the books are built upon this foundation.
Narratively, Bledsoe takes pains to avoid the easiest tropes that might cheapen the impact of what he’s built. For example, in the first book, The Hum and the Shiver, the main character, Bronwyn Hyatt, is returning to Needsville after having spent time in the military. A mission went horribly wrong; she was captured, injured, and sexually assaulted (or ass-fucked, as she puts it, because one thing the Tufa are not is decorous in their language). She doesn’t remember much of what happened, but the process resulted in the loss of her magic, and for various Tufa-internal reasons, it’s a matter of some urgency that she recover it. The book thus sets up a kind of tension, in which it seems that the only way to recover her magic is to relive the memory of her assault: face the trauma, accept it, and only in this way can she move forward. I was squirming the whole time as this plotline played out, because it seemed as if it was building towards some horrible kind of titillating climax involving an on-page rape.
But rather than fulfill that trope, Bledsoe sidesteps it neatly. Bronwyn decides that, actually, she’s perfectly happy living without the memory of that horrible thing happening to her. The lost magic does not need to be a metaphor for her imperfect sense of self that can never be whole until she relives the atrocity. She can find a way forward without going through it all again. I’m not thrilled that this plotline existed, because rape-as-motivation is gross and bad; but given that Bledsoe decided to invoke the trope, I’m impressed at how he subverted it.
This discomfort from the first book carries through the whole series in small ways. In every book there is always something that rubs me just a bit the wrong way. For one, the narrative is extremely male-gazey. Not maliciously so—and it’s clear that Bledsoe is trying super hard not to be a jerk about it. We’ve got explicitly matriarchal power structures, combined with cultural norms that do not shame women for promiscuity or unmarried pregnancies. But still: there are an awful lot of highly sexy Tufa ladies who shimmy and purr and wriggle in a way the men do not match.
Other books make narrative decisions that (for me) don’t quite work. In Chapel of Ease, the whole book is built around a mystery that never gets answered. There are thematic reasons to justify leaving the mystery unsolved, but they depend on the magic of the Tufa music to fill in the gaps. I haven’t got the Tufa music outside the book, so I walked away feeling unsatisfied. In The Fairies of Sadieville, the nested narrative is a clever conceit, but each narrative is increasingly shallow. In principle this could act as a commentary on the way history can become simplified, losing nuance in the memories that are preserved only as stories. Except, like the unsolved mystery in Chapel of Ease, it doesn’t work: many of the Tufa were there at the events being portrayed, so the simplification cannot be the result of oral traditions smoothing out the snags of real history. And most egregiously, the fifth book, Gather Her Round, culminates in an act of shocking brutality that we are invited to interpret as justice, but which I can only see as murder.
These books are not perfect. But they are unlike anything else I have read. Redneck fairy bluegrass musicians is something that feels like it should be a joke; but in Bledsoe’s hands, the Tufa are portrayed even-handedly, virtues and vices alike; and the result endows them with dignity and respect for their otherworldly wonders, alongside a clear-eyed acknowledgment of their undeniable humanity.
Nerd Coefficient: 8/10: Well worth your time and attention.
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