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Long Black Curl, by Alex Bledsoe, Tor Books, 2015, $24.95.
Tufa Tales: Appalachian Fae, by Tuatha Dea, Tuatha Dea, 2015, $20. CD.
SPOILERS ahead.
Seriously. Skip to the next review if you haven't yet, but think you might, read the two previous books in Alex Bledsoe's Tufa series, The Hum and the Shiver and Wisp of a Thing. Because three books into a series, it's difficult to talk about a new book such as this without spoilers - especially when events here gain added resonance because of what we know about the characters from what has gone on before.
The opening is genius. I've seen any number of stories and novels that play with the myth of Robert Johnson meeting the devil at the crossroads at midnight. It's one of the best known pieces of folklore attached to rock'n'roll - and before you feel the need to correct me, yes, I know Johnson was a blues great, but the midnight deal with the devil has long been a staple of rock/pop/country musical mythology as well.
But how many stories have you read that start off with their own take of that fatal night in 1959 which was, as pundits lamented, "the day the music died"? Standing in for Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens are Guy Berry, P. J. "Large Sarge" Sargent, and Byron Harley. The latter is the one that concerns us, since he's the only one to survive the mountaintop crash. (Bledsoe also changes the setting of that fatal night.) After the crash Harley stumbles into what the Tufa call slow time where sixty years can go by in the passing of a single night. When he finally returns to the world from that one night by a campfire after the crash, his career is long over, his wife and daughter are dead, and he blames the Tufa for what's happened to him.
The Tufa are Alex Bledsoe's addition to the folklore of North America. It's said that they were already living in the Appalachian Mountains when the Native Americans first arrived. They're a secretive people with black hair,...