Portal fantasies are a tried-and-true staple of the fantasy genre; nothing speaks to the fantastical like a golden doorknob in a tree, a wardrobe that leads to a snowy wood, a rusted key that takes you somewhere new and mysterious—to escape, to journey, to adventure in lands dangerous and beautiful, a space where you can finally see the world you left behind with clear eyes… You can say a lot about our world by leaving it behind.
Ashley Blooms’ brilliant new novel, Where I Can’t Follow, is less about what makes people go to these fantasy worlds, and more about what challenges them to stay in ours?
In Blackdamp County, Kentucky where Maren Walker grew up, first under the care of her mother Nell and then her Granny, doors appear to people. And they don’t always look like doors. Some of them are clouds of fog that hover over you with a ladder’s rung barely visible. Others are a little red ball that trails you around town. Some are cracks in walls and others are beams of light, shining on a singular hill. It’s possible to get these doors to leave; if it leaves, it doesn’t come back. But if you let your door wait while you struggle to make a decision, it can grow out of control, making reality strain.
Maren has been waiting for her door to show up, ever since her mother took one when she was a little girl. And on the night Maren’s Granny is missing, when she finds out her childhood crush has moved back home, her little door appears, and the war to keep Maren on Earth begins. Because no one knows what’s on the other side of their door, any door, and what Maren is confronting in Appalachia might be enough to send her over. From these auspices, Blooms begins to weave a tale that is equally bittersweet and angry, led by a complex and fascinating protagonist caught between two worlds: one that lets her down with its share of injustices, but which contains those she loves, and one that intrigues and terrifies her in equal measures, who took the one person she most wants back.
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Where I Can’t Follow
Blooms is a masterful writer, one of those storytellers who you can tell from the first moment, is in absolute control of her prose. The details, the asides, the slow reveal of a setting, a moment, an emotion, coming to light like the slider of a theater light being gently increased for the audience’s eyes to adjust, Blooms is in control of her narrative with confidence. As a reader, I could feel myself drawn in by an expert and I let myself be reeled in. Blooms infuses Maren, her world, her family and friends, and of course her door, with warmth and depth, refusing shorthand or caricature. She points to each tile in the mosaic with lush description: this is where Maren’s hurt lives. This is where Granny drew the line around her heart. This is where Carver fell in love, can you see how its shape fits next to Maren’s? This is where the colors of Julie collide, can you see the beauty? There are no shortcuts here, and page by page, Blooms shades in our understanding of everyone, their contradictions and their loves and their fears and their rage.
Don’t mistake the soft blue of the cover and don’t think the flowers on there don’t have their thorns. Where I Can’t Follow is a book that explores heavy themes of mental illness, addiction, self-harm, and much more. (There’s a very helpful trigger warning guide on her website.) In a story all about someone tempted to leave our world, it’s in Blooms’ grounded and nuanced exploration of the obstacles that make staying so hard in which she does her best advocating for sticking around. From Maren’s “fog,” in which an inner voice tells her all the ways she’s worthless or does not deserve help, to an uncovered diary from her mother where she writes frankly about her alcohol addiction and why she took her little door, even to her Granny’s growing dementia or her best friend’s bipolar diagnosis, Blooms shows the multiple facets of these real world struggles. There’s no sugar coating, but there is nuance and care and love in these explorations and depictions of the very real things that affect these characters and how they process them, how they take care of one another and their community. When there is a door following you, making it easy to leave it all behind, Blooms posits the idea that it might only be by staying that you can find the healing you’re seeking on the other side.
And yet, there is a softness to this book, and that blue and those flowers are earned. Blackdamp County and those that live there, seen through the loving eyes of Maren, are human and flawed and strong even in the face of those things, magical and otherwise, which threaten to whisk them away from this world. Through moments of crisis, as one thing after another goes wrong for Maren and those in her orbit, when it would be so easy to go, Blooms illustrates again and again, the strength it takes to stay and work towards justice, healing, and care. And perhaps more importantly, she also does the harder work of not casting aspersions or judgment on those whom do leave, but gives those characters the same level of love and nuance, only asking the reader to see them, know them, and understand the choices made.
With expert use of the uncanny to highlight and showcase our own world back to us, Where I Can’t Follow challenges the conventional norms of the portal fantasy, that a protagonist must leave our world to find what they’ve been looking for, and instead, radically, invites us to imagine that it is the magic and love around us that can transform us. Blooms invites us to stay, even if it is harder. Because if we work at it and we open our hearts to those who love us, we can make a door of our own. And whatever’s on the other side, we’ll go through it together.
Where I Can’t Follow is published by Sourcebooks Landmark
Read an excerpt here.
Martin Cahill is a writer living in Queens who works as the Marketing and Publicity Manager for Erewhon Books. He has fiction work forthcoming in 2021 at Serial Box, as well as Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Fireside Fiction. Martin has also written book reviews and essays for Book Riot, Strange Horizons, and the Barnes and Noble SF&F Blog. Follow him online at @mcflycahill90 and his new Substack newsletter, Weathervane, for thoughts on books, gaming, and other wonderfully nerdy whatnots.
