Story 245: "A Thin Veneer" by Analise

[wendelah1]

First, your Fanfiction BINGO Update. We're getting so close! Come on, people, we can do this. We still need a story for each of the following categories: Aah-aaah!, Best Friends, MY ASS, and Straight People Do Not Exist in This AU. I can imagine exactly what the latter would look like. It would be an AU with these pairings: Mulder/Krycek, Skinner/Doggett (don't tell me you can't see it) and Scully/Reyes. Someone, somewhere must have written this fic.

Like a good little mod, I am trying to stick to the nomination queue. I'm working backwards, which means if you nominated something last year, we will get to you this year, but if you nominated something in 2008, chances are you've moved on long ago, maybe to Fringe, or to the Sherlock fandom, or possibly The Walking Dead. Sorry about that, folks.

Last year, an anonymouse nominated--something else--by Analise, a something else I didn't care for. We've never done one of her fics and I couldn't bear the idea of doing something that seemed so--uncharacteristically sentimental. So because I'm Bad Mod Wendy, I decided to be contrary and post her post-col/thriller fic, which I read a long time ago and remember liking. What can I say? I like post-col stories.

This is the pretty, illustrated version, but there is a text file on the site, too, if that's your preference.

SUMMARY: Colonization has come and gone, taking civilization with it. But not necessarily civilzation's monsters.

Read A Thin Veneer

Comments

[discordantwords.livejournal.com]

This is an interesting little genre bender, taking a fairly standard psychopath storyline and dropping it right in the midst of a post-col apocalyptic landscape. The writing was very good.

It honestly felt a bit like an excerpt from a longer work. We drop in on the story and meet a whole bunch of new characters without any real introduction. It took me a couple of read throughs to get everyone straight in my head. The impact of one character's death was lessened somewhat because I had to go back to see where I had read her name before. I would have liked to know more about Roz, the hybrid, and how they joined up with her, too.

I liked this enough that I'm going to be reading the other stuff the author has on her site. The illustrations were pretty, too.

[tri-sbr.livejournal.com]

I hadn't read this one before. I thought it was good, but probably not so good that I'll read it again soon. The whodunit was decent but it wasn't too hard to suspect the culprit (there is a really really limited set of suspects, and you just know the new visitor was supposed to be a red herring). I would have liked a little more connection between the murders and the post-col world; I'm not even sure I know what I mean, but it felt a little disjointed or something.

The writing was good, I thought, not too much or too little in the way of descriptions. I think my favorite part was the illustrations, actually. I kept scrolling to see when the next one was coming up.

A little rant
One thing that annoyed me (and has tended to annoy me in some other fic) was some of the treatment of Scully's pregnancy, on a few fronts. The story seemed to pretty much ignore the question of how did it happen (despite the brief mention of "the fact that she shouldn't have been pregnant to begin with" and calling it a miracle). This is a pretty big thing to just kind of side-step. Maybe the pregnancy was basically used to give the killer a reason to target Scully, but that's kind of convenient. The story also promoted the idea that she shouldn't be doing any exercise/physical labor because she is pregnant; it does say that "it had been dicey as it was just getting to this point" with no further explanation (pregnancy complications? reference to the miraculous nature of the conception?), but for most pregnancies, there is no reason one can't do physical things in moderation. If there is a reason in Scully's case, we aren't told about it. And lastly, when Scully is running with Shan from Denny, we get told "this sort of thing was exactly what stimulated a miscarriage, but she couldn't stop." She's 8 months pregnant - almost to term; it can't be a miscarriage. If she's having contractions, it's either false labor or slightly premature labor. I don't know, I'm making it a bigger deal than it is, but I don't like all of the outdated ideas and falsehoods that surround pregnancy or reading things that tend to reinforce them. As a caveat, I have no medical expertise related to pregnancy or otherwise, so maybe I'm wrong - correct me please. :)
done with rant

Still, on balance, I'm glad I read the story.

[infinitlight.livejournal.com]

I read the text-only version and am now scrolling through the pictures. Like tri_sbr, I like them a lot. People often do book covers for their fic but I don't think I've ever read one that was illustrated throughout before.

I liked that there were plenty of newly introduced characters and enjoyed the mystery, although I figured out the killer early on. Despite the fact that it's set post-colonization and there are Shredders, it didn't feel very X-Filesy to me, more like Mulder and Scully were dropped into a regular mystery novel. Overall I enjoyed it a lot.