RPF, Hugh Dillon/Callum Keith Rennie, set during the period before Hard Core Logo filming. Hugh struts around and acts like a jerk until he realizes that the reason Callum won’t have casual sex with him is that Callum’s not casual about Hugh. The sex is nngh hot, and the emotion is just as raw and urgent.
Joe/Billy. Awesome structure, and some really cool and different ideas that pull this one above the usual HCL fic. There’s some fabulous writing in it and some odd grammatical errors, but overall I like it lots.
Tim Bayliss/Billy Tallent. This is a rewritten version of Shell’s first fanfic, and as someone who tried but failed to read the earlier version, I can say this is a bazillion times better, with tightness and focus and pacing that was missing from the first attempt. Bayliss is undercover, posing as a member of a Utah polygamist cult that is clearly based on the Fundamentalist LDS church. This is the element that originally attracted me to this story; I saw a documentary about the FLDS, Banking on Heaven, at a film festival earlier this year, and I can say that as horrifying as the elements of this story are, they’re not very far removed from the reality.
Just before going undercover, Bayliss meets Billy Tallent, who while in Arizona to play a concert meets a young escapee from the cult, who is subsequently murdered. The two men feel an instant connection. In fact, for me, it’s a little too instant - not the immediate sex, but the closeness of their relationship afterward - and because of this, the story feels more like an established-relationship story than a first-time, to me. (By the way, if I were rating this story I’d give it NC17, because the sex scenes are explicit.)
If you, like me, don’t know anything about Homicide, skim (or ignore) the prologue, which will only baffle you. (Interestingly, I discovered after reading that Bayliss is canonically bisexual.) If you don’t know anything about HCL, don’t worry. In fact, IMHO the characterization of Billy is a long stretch from canon, even given the passage of time and the way the events of HCL (which this story does spoil) might have affected him. But actually, this Billy is a far more sympathetic and even heroic character - to the point that I felt as though some of his actions (and some aspects of their relationship) were unrealistic for anybody. But, you know what? I didn’t care. It was still a great read, and hurt/comfort fans will sigh happily.
Mostly gen. Billy comes to terms with his feelings of guilt over Joe’s death. The structure is really cool, alternating interview snippets with Billy’s interactions with the various people in his life: the members of Jenifur, Mary, and most especially John Oxenburger, who really shines here in the same sort of role he has in the film. John is the Greek Chorus, the voice of reason in a most ironic sense, and he cuts through to the heart of Billy’s emotional turmoil.
Billy finds letters that Joe had written him before their final tour. So it’s sort of semi-epistolary fic: Joe’s letters and Billy’s reactions to them. An interesting device to make it more of a story than just Billy angsting.
Joe/Billy, crossover with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (although you don’t need to know that movie to understand this story). Billy gets his memories of Joe erased. Nifty reverse-chronological structure, cool and creepy.
John Oxenberger character piece. This really captures John’s lunacy and emotional lability. Plus, one can only watch so many depressing Joe-centric vids (all with the clip of you-know-what) - it was refreshing to see something else.
Joe/Billy, angst. The song works extraordinarily well with the subject matter. I liked the timing with the gunshot, the punches, the kiss etc and the nice intercuts of them playing.
Joe/Billy. Portrait of a fucked-up relationship. It’s all about power and, again, head games. (As is the movie, in many ways…)
Joe/Billy. Sex, head games, and self-deception.
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Joe/Billy, Billy/various both m and f. I assume if you’re reading this rec, you know the movie, but be warned there are spoilers in this rec (as well as, obviously, in the story itself).
Maybe it’s because I started out in HP fandom, where ghosts are characters too, but I really adore afterlife fic. This story begins with Joe’s death - how Billy deals with it, and how Joe deals with it. And neither of them deal with it very well. But then Joe’s shade starts haunting Billy, so to speak, and things start to change. I won’t say too much about how they change, because the slow build of the story to the eventual realization and climax is so artfully done that I don’t want to spoil it. I’ll just say that the author is very clever, and everything fits together beautifully and logically.
The story is structured beautifully, with clever choices of repetition and variation. Each scene contributes something, and the bits wrap in on themselves perfectly. One of my particular favorites is the scene with Bucky Haight; another is the scene just before that, with Ashley’s dad. Finally, there’s a lot of very hot sex throughout, but none of it feels gratuitous. It’s all there for a reason, and the reason becomes clear as the story builds to, er, the climax.