The X-Files

Somewhere in the basement of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, past the offices that keep normal hours, a filing cabinet holds the cases the Bureau would rather not solve: the abductions with no abductors, the corpses that will not stay dead, the lights over the wheat field that three sober witnesses swear they saw. These are the X-files. Working them are two FBI agents who agree on almost nothing — Fox Mulder, who wants to believe, and Dana Scully, the pathologist sent to debunk him — and a truth that keeps receding the closer they get. Trust no one. The written casework runs on two tracks. Standalone investigations fill the adult novels — Kevin J. Anderson's trilogy of Ground Zero, Ruins, and Antibodies, and Charles L. Grant's Goblins and Whirlwind — each a self-contained horror with the agents dropped into fresh dread. Around them sits a younger shelf: Les Martin's and Ellen Steiber's episode novelizations, the X-Files Origins pair reconstructing Mulder and Scully as teenagers, and Jonathan Maberry's anthologies gathering many hands under a single flashlight beam. The register never wavers: rain-slick, fluorescent-lit, patient. Every case splits between the monster of the week and the larger mythology — a colonization conspiracy stitched through decades of official denial — and the pleasure is watching skeptic and believer both turn out partly right. Begin anywhere; the files are episodic by design. Adult readers can open Anderson's Ground Zero cold; younger ones start with Origins. The truth is out there.