Author: Ashley Blooms

Ashley Blooms is a novelist born in Kentucky who draws on Appalachian places, family ties, grief, and the uneasy pull between leaving and staying. She earned an MFA as a John and Renée Grisham Fellow from the University of Mississippi, and her short fiction has appeared in dark fantasy and horror anthologies as well as Fantasy & Science Fiction. Sourcebooks Landmark released Where I Can’t Follow during 2022 as her sophomore novel. The story takes place in the fictional Kentucky community of Blackdamp County, where Maren Walker encounters mysterious doors that offer residents a permanent escape from lives they can no longer bear. The speculative premise remains closely tied to questions about poverty, loyalty, and home. Blooms joins Appalachian literary storytelling to magical elements instead of treating the doors as a conventional adventure device. Her attention stays with the people left behind and with the difficult choice facing Maren between an unknown elsewhere and the complicated place that formed her. The novel also examines how departure can reshape community obligations.