Story 270: "Finding Rokovoko" by prufrock's love

[wendelah1]

"Queequeg was a native of Rokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are."
- Moby-Dick; or The Whale, by Herman Melville

Fanfiction, both reading it and writing it, has been off my radar entirely these past few months. You can easily guess why. I even forgot the xf_book_club's anniversary date. Sorry

Comments

[mosinging1986]

Oh, thank you! I need to read this ASAP.

Real life has also imploded for me lately, and there's no end in sight. A new PL story is a great gift!

[wendelah1]

Isn't it a wonderful gift?

I hope RL eases up for you sooner rather than later.

[mosinging1986]

Thanks.

[keslei]

Damn it. I've been trying to be good and not read fanfic until I finish the last bit of my thesis, but a new prufrock's love fic may prove to be too tempting...

[wendelah1]

It's a fast read. You will not regret it.

[mcparrot]

Trying to read on my Kindle tablet but the formatting is weird. Anyone else having trouble?

[wendelah1]

Sorry you're having issues. I don't use a Kindle tablet. The formatting looks fine on my aged HP desktop and my Asus laptop. You could ask mimic117 about it. She is hosting prufrock's love's newer fic until Gossamer begins accepting stories again. Her email is mimic1172 at gmail etc.

[mcparrot]

Thanks. I'll try emailing Mimic.
Edited to say, actually, I opened it on my computer, stripped the formatting and pasted it into a document. That worked.

[ikielove]

I loved it. Mulder's just right

[wendelah1]

No one writes a better Mulder than prufrock's love. This younger version of Mulder is less cynical than the character from her stories set post-series but that seems right to me.

Her stories remind me of why I fell in love with the characters and the series.

[zinnia03]

I enjoyed this story very much, as I do most Prufrock stories. I was, I admit, a little leery of the "horror" description, but it's not Friday the 13th/Halloween type of horror, but a more realistic (and maybe therefore in some ways even more horrible) than those types. It reminded me a bit of reading Peter Straub's "Ghost Story" which remains one of my favorites in the genre. Things are simply not what they seem.

More specifically, the dialogue between M&S sounds like an episode to me, in the best way. P's Mulder always seems slightly in awe of Scully, even when he's ticked off or annoyed with her.

I devoured this story when it first came out so now I need to go back and give it a more careful read.

BTW, if anyone is having trouble loading it on their Kindle, what I did was save the story as a text file in Word, and then emailed it to my Kindle account and it worked fine.

[keslei]

More specifically, the dialogue between M&S sounds like an episode to me, in the best way. P's Mulder always seems slightly in awe of Scully, even when he's ticked off or annoyed with her.

I didn't realize it until you pointed it out, but this is so true, and one of the reasons I love her characterization of Mulder so much. And this time around, her Scully was pretty spot on too.

I was, I admit, a little leery of the "horror" description, but it's not Friday the 13th/Halloween type of horror, but a more realistic (and maybe therefore in some ways even more horrible) than those types.I rarely read horror, but this story was the kind of creepy that I like. I think you're right about about it being more horrible due to its realism, though. I also think that having the story set in a middle-of-nowhere asylum allowed readers' imaginations to fill in the mental picture to the fullest horrific extent - we've all seen shows or movies with a creepy haunted asylum and we can take the descriptions we're given and envision whatever we find most