B
Genre: Science Fiction/Fantasy
This guest review is from Crystal Anne! Crystal Anne with An E comes to us from a sunny clime, but prefers to remain a pale indoor cat. She enjoys reading, cross-stitching something nerdy, going to see live music, and playing video games. She works as an autism consultant by day, got a degree in information science for fun, and currently serves on her local library advisory board.
…
TW/CW at the very beginning: This will not come as a surprise to anyone who knows anything about The X-Files, but this book is loaded with trauma. It opens with the murder of a pregnant woman, and in addition, due to the nature of what the characters have gone through before the book ever opens, we are dealing with loss of a child, sexual and reproductive assault, raging amounts of PTSD, and loss of purpose. Take care of your brains.
Okay, now that I have made sure that no one gets hurt, let’s see why we’re here.
So, in news that would surprise no one who’s ever spent any kind of time with me, I am a big nerd. That’s honestly why I keep writing. In the tradition of many a GenX nerd, I had my early, extremely formative fandoms. In my case, one of the biggest and most formative was The X-Files.
It had everything my nascent sci-fi/horror nerd wanted out of life: conspiracies, good action, clever writing, and hot people. Dana Scully was goals and I had a crush on Mulder. And like all good X-Philes, I desperately wanted them to kiss.
It was also a bonding activity in my family. My mom and sisters didn’t like the show, but my dad and I were OBSESSED. For much of the time that The X-Files was on the air, my dad was stationed at an Air Force base away from us, and Dad and I would watch the show and then immediately have a Sunday night telephone debriefing once it was over. There’s probably a reason that, to this day, Dad and I remain movie buddies (the last one we saw was Godzilla x Kong, and we both thoroughly enjoyed it). We are constantly recommending TV shows and movies to each other.
Which brings us to now. I was idly trawling the Internet, as one does, and came across a social media post from Claudia Gray celebrating the release of her new X-Files book. The same Claudia Gray that wrote my favorite Star Wars books, that I have more than once spewed rainbows over in this very forum?!
Well, kids, she pounced. I had that on my Kindle and a hardcover copy ordered for my dad faster than you can say “The Lone Gunmen.”
The first thing that really jumps out to me is how well Gray understands Scully and Mulder. She understands them the same way that she understood Leia Organa, with the kind of care and detail that can only come from a deep love and respect of the characters. She is very cognizant of the trauma that these characters have experienced and how it would color both their worldviews and how they would exist in the modern world.
Let’s start with Mulder. At the beginning of this book, the best way to describe Mulder would be “unmoored”. Neither he nor Scully are employed at the FBI, and without the purpose that the X-Files provided him, he has developed depression and often cuts himself off from those he loves, especially Scully. Trying to find some sense of purpose, he goes on conspiracy podcasts and occasionally interviews for positions as a criminal profiler (an area that he is well-known to be gifted in).
He also struggles with the fact that while there is much better knowledge of the kind of phenomena he investigated, there also is so much noise and misinformation that it doesn’t matter. As he tells Scully: “The truth is out there, but now so is everything else.” When Scully becomes pregnant, he finds purpose, but he also finds new ways to worry about her safety and her health. That said, while he is understandably very much in worrier mode, he is also respectful and trusts in her competence and autonomy.
Scully, meanwhile, is now working primarily as a medical doctor, specializing in children with genetic disorders. This is a choice borne entirely out of her trauma and the idea that maybe she can help children like William.
(X-Files lore break here, he’s the son that she and Mulder had that was later adopted and renamed Jackson Van de Kamp, and may or may not have been a product of Scully being fertilized using alien DNA by the Cigarette-Smoking Man).
Finding out that she is pregnant causes both shock and fear for her, even as she is elated by the idea of finally having the opportunity to raise a child with Mulder. The shock is based on her age, while the fear is based both on her age and the fact that she has been forcibly impregnated before, and is terrified that it has somehow happened again. She is very literally afraid to be happy about this pregnancy, especially as she denies her grief over the death of her son.
Amidst all this, Mulder and Scully are approached by the same FBI that had long since written them off into irrelevance. The X-Files, long since mothballed, have become a running joke around the bureau. That said, they are again being assailed by multiple cases of unexplainable phenomena, and suffice to say that the next generation have not been trained for this. So they are brought back into the fold, and asked to focus primarily on two cases: the murders of pregnant women right there in Washington D.C., and the seemingly unconnected murders that have in common the fact that the suspect literally poofs into smoke (think Kurt Wagner).
This brings us to the second thing that is of great interest, which is bringing the X-Files, a show from the late 90s/early 00s, into the 21st century. The X-Files, both as an in-universe phenomenon and the TV show, are very much a product of their time. They are based on the ideas of trusting no one, especially your government, and conspiracy theories galore. Bringing them into the 21st century presents a whole new set of challenges for the agents tasked with investigating them.
Bigfoot sighting? Could be a deepfake.
Guy disappears into a cloud of smoke after murdering someone? Someone probably made that with AI.
Weird electrical phenomena that occur around this specific person? Very real possibility that they are carrying a device designed to cause that phenomenon.
Mulder and Scully have to adapt their investigative techniques. For example: Mulder thinks at one point about how, back in the day, he would have combed through smaller-press newspapers, as they were more likely to print news about weird goings-on in their regions. Now? Most of those small-press newspapers are long gone, either swallowed up by larger conglomerates or just not in existence anymore. He has to find alternate ways to find X-Files cases, and separate out real incidents from the clout-chasers and crackpots.
In addition, our society presents all-new ways for Scully to be both skeptical and angry. It’s never been easier to fake psychic or paranormal phenomena, and she more than once points out that there is plenty of technology out there that can easily mimic it, so if you want her to believe in something, you’d better have some empirical evidence ready to go. She also looks at certain current developments in how society views reproductive rights and is reminded of how violated both she and Mulder were, and how traumatized she remains because of it.
The book is full of fun tidbits for fans of the original TV series. We see several references to the agents that Scully worked with when David Duchovny left the series the first time, as well as famous villains such as Robert Patrick Modell, Eugene Tooms, and naturally and inevitably, the Cigarette-Smoking Man (shout out to William B. Davis for playing one of the absolute rat bastards of the 90s).
While these are appreciated, they didn’t take me out of the story, and it’s okay if your memory of these names is hazy (a quick noodle through Google will clear it right up). The story stands on its own. I will say the pacing gets a bit saggy in the middle part, but I think it’s because the book is spending A LOT of time in Mulder and Scully’s heads, both in perspective and via diary entries. But if you’re there for character work, Gray more often than not is doing god-tier work in that area.
If there was anything that I would have liked more of, it probably would have been seeing our intrepid team doing more actual investigating. That interplay between their individual styles was always a high point of the stories, and as an old-school fan, I will always want more of that.
As for the ending, no spoilers, but it indicated that there are more stories to tell, and I would be highly likely to check them out. There are always new tales to be told, and I would be pretty pleased if Gray gets to be the one that continues telling them.
Grade: A good solid B, since I wanted more investigation.
This book is available from:
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well.
Thanks!
Great Review. Now I have to read this. As a fellow Gen X I get the feels.