Story 211: “In the Bleak” by Teanna

[amyhit.livejournal.com]

Our next fic is a relatively short colonization apocafic. To my knowledge, Teanna is a largely unknown author in the XF fandom. She only ever wrote three short XF fics, but her writing is spare, intelligent, sharply observant, and poetic without being wordy. She unflinchingly explores the characters and how they cope with fear, grief, and failure. I should definitely warn everyone that this story is, as the title suggests, bleak. Teanna warns readers that it’s "not a happy story," but at the risk of spoiling everyone, I should probably warn you that major character death is strongly implied and death in general is pretty ubiquitous in this story. This is the apocalypse portrayed with more grim realism than usual.

I hope some of you will read it anyway. There’s plenty in this fic to discuss, and I think summertime is probably the best time to read it, so that those of us who are particularly susceptible to gut-wrenching fanfic can shake off the darkness with a healthy dose of sunlight afterwards.

Read In the Bleak.

Comments

[bardsmaid.livejournal.com]

Having done a lot of research into wartime experiences, I don't find bleak off-putting. Teanna does a good job of capturing the numbness and dissociation people go through when dealing with long periods when conditions are tough and it seems there's no progress to be made. I especially liked her treatment of the very end of the story, because it rings true to experiences I've read about, people suddenly "coming to themselves" as the end approaches, and the choices made/actions taken by Mulder and Scully at this point seemed appropriate for the characters as we've come to know them.

However, I have to say that my suspension of disbelief was severely jolted right at the outset by the corpse on the roadside. Having just done some research into this topic for something I'm writing, there seems to be a serious lack of plausibility here. Four weeks later, the corpse is still lying there, almost as if it were a mannequin--no really notable decomposition, no bloating, none of the smells or the processes dead bodies inevitably go through. Children using the corpse as their gathering place? I really can't see it. Plus there's a reason people get rid of corpses as soon as possible; the associated health hazards are something people in this situation wouldn't likely want to add to the burdens they're already facing.

[wendelah1]

I concur about the corpse for sure. Even in the cold of New England, a dead body would be showing massive signs of decomposition after that amount of time. I can't imagine children coming anywhere near it. For the health hazard, I can't imagine Scully allowing it. I don't think she'd have any trouble taking on Doggett.

The other thing that threw me out of this story was the sudden appearance of Langley, out of nowhere. Why didn't Mulder ask him about the other Gunmen? Why were they talking in code about Scully? I thought it was odd for Doggett to have ended up there all the way from San Diego, too. How did that happen? It makes me wonder if Teanna knew much about US geography, about the distances between the East and West coasts. She does have Mulder wonder briefly about the coincidence of having three FBI agents in this town, but then it gets dropped. The mysteries all remain unsolved. She just drops people into the story, stirs in some dead bodies and aliens and poof! Everyone dies, so there's no need to bother with the plot or the characterizations anyway.

I found this story frustrating. Compared to the amount of detail and background we get in Life During Wartime, this doesn't add up to much in the end. I can't imagine ever bothering reading it again.