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

[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.