writes the kinds of books where, when you corner someone and insist she read one, and you tell her what it's about, she's like, "Um, vampires? Oh, do they sparkle and fall in love and feel all angsty?" Or, "Sure, I bet a book that incorporates a lot of old-time country music and magic doesn't suck at all. (Oh my god, why won't someone rescue me?)"
Honestly, I thought the same thing when I was staring at the pile of his novels I wanted to read before I interviewed him. But, people, Alex Bledsoe is on a one-man mission to remind people just how scary vampires can be, and how strange and unsettling traditional mountain music can be in the hands of a master storyteller.
Bledsoe lives in Wisconsin, but he was born and raised here in Tennessee and many of his books and short stories are set in Tennessee and deal with very Tennessee-specific locations and situations. His vampire novels — Blood Groove and The Girls With the Games of Blood — are set in Memphis in the 1970s (with a brief detour in the second one into northern Mississippi). The first book in his Tufa series — The Hum and the Shiver — is set in East Tennessee. Plus his Firefly Witch stories are set in Weakleyville, which is a reference to Martin so thinly veiled that the characters in Weakleyville drink in that famous Martin bar Cadillac's.
He has a new book in his Eddie LaCrosse series — The Wake of the Bloody Angel (which is not set in Tennessee, unless we have an ocean and more pirates than I'm currently aware of) — coming out in July, and that gave me the perfect excuse to ask him about, oh, well, everything.
