Over the summer, Disney Books and Hyperion Avenue publishing released a new novel entitled The X-Files: Perihelion, which continues the story of the popular 1990s science-fiction television series. Laughing Place was provided with a review copy back at San Diego Comic-Con 2024, and I finally got around to reading it this past week. Below are my (mostly spoiler-free) thoughts on this book.
First, the title– the word “perihelion” refers to the point at which an astronomical object’s orbit (the Earth, for example) is closest to the sun. How that relates to this adventure for FBI Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Katherine Scully isn’t revealed until the final page of this novel, and I actually found that moment to be fairly satisfying as metaphors go. Next, the author– The X-Files: Perihelion is written by Claudia Gray, who has penned some of my favorite recent Star Wars books including Bloodline and The High Republic – Into the Dark. So no issues there, and when this novel was announced I honestly couldn’t think of a better person to take up the reins of one of my all-time-favorite pop-culture franchises. But our first problem arises when I try to get across when exactly Perihelion takes place– early chapters of the book place this story a few weeks after the events of The X-Files season 11 (the second of the reboot seasons), which would set it somewhere around mid-2018. But later chapters include very specific media allusions– including one to Star Wars: Andor, which wasn’t even publicly announced until the summer of 2019 and did not receive an official title until late 2020– let alone not being released until the fall of 2022. Anachronistic references aside, I have a sneaking suspicion that Gray initially intended to set this novel in the present, and then either decided to or was encouraged to push it back closer to season 11 for reasons of Mulder and Scully’s respective ages.
I won’t go into the reasons why their ages matter so much, but suffice it to say that I wish Gray or her editor would have caught the jarring contradictions caused by the time-shift, of which there are others. They’re not terribly important beyond being fodder for nitpicking, but they do speak to a larger sense of uneasiness I felt while reading Perihelion. I don’t want to go into too many plot details here, so in broad strokes I’ll say that the narrative involves our two protagonists being re-drafted back into the Federal Bureau of Investigation to investigate two new X-Files cases: one involving a serial killer targeting pregnant women who also apparently has the paranormal ability to affect electrical currents, and the other concerning a hitman who can teleport in a puff of smoke, much like Nightcrawler from the X-Men. And that’s not only a connection that I drew myself– Gray points out the Nightcrawler comparison in dialogue between Mulder and Scully, I suppose in an effort to hang a lampshade on the similarity. This leads me to my other major gripe about Perihelion– it just veers way too far into the X-Men direction, even beyond the Nightcrawler stuff. As the agents begin to follow the clues left behind in these murders and track their two separate suspects, they start to uncover a conspiracy that ties (uh oh) into the ever-more-convoluted mythology that unraveled over the course of 11 television seasons and two theatrical movies.
That, I think, is this novel’s ultimate failing. In trying, once again, to bring everything from The X-Files’ past together in a way that makes any kind of sense, Gray’s usually-compelling writing becomes bogged down in way, way too much history that these characters have shared together since 1993. The series was always a blend of standalone “monster of the week”-type episodes and serialized installments (usually around network sweeps) that furthered the mythology, and I was a big proponent of both until creator Chris Carter and his writing staff seemingly lost the thread of the latter. Nowadays I think it would probably just be better to set stories about Mulder and Scully in the mid-90s and have them chase monsters again every once in a while… it’s just so much simpler that way. But to her credit, Gray puts in a good effort here to boil things down. She gives us a new villain (again, with ties to the fearsome, shadowy Syndicate that we loved to hate back in the old days) and a new purpose to our heroes’ quest– going too far into this aspect of the book would reveal my X-Men complaint from above. Sometimes it does feel like X-Files fan-fiction, which made much more sense to me when I read the author’s acknowledgements at the end and the revelation of how she got her start writing Newsnet stories about Mulder and Scully in the 90s. She even self-inserts as a new informant character called only Avatar– get it?– who fills in for the deceased Deep Throat, Mr. X., Marita Covarrubias, etc., each of whom previously served as the lead characters’ guide on the show.
That’s the other thing I really appreciated about Gray’s obvious dedication to The X-Files: almost every supporting or recurring character from years past gets a shout-out somewhere in this book, up to and including the Lone Gunmen, who died in season 9 but admiringly remain in Mulder and Scully’s thoughts all these years later. Also haunting their memories is their son William, who was killed off (or was he?) at the end of season 11… but it’s those last few seasons’ worth of plot twists– both from the original run and the reboot years, that muddy the waters here and end up making everything overly convoluted… and that’s putting it mildly. Again, Gray does her best to tie it all together, but ends up doing so in a way that eventually comes close to shattering the very foundation of The X-Files’ premise. She’s great at capturing these characters’ voices (the agents’ mind-screen musings and ponderous journal entries are particularly on-point), but things become so outlandish– even for this franchise– for Mulder and (especially) Scully by the final handful of chapters that I started questioning the way they were reacting to these extreme situations as individuals. I don’t necessarily think that any of this is Gray’s fault– it’s probably more symptomatic of a series that was run into the ground by the FOX network continuing to renew it long past its prime. And that’s why in my estimation, I can really only see The X-Files successfully continuing by returning to its high-concept, one-mystery-at-a-time roots rather than digger even deeper into the global conspiracy that began to break our collective brains more than three decades ago. At this point it’s a quagmire from which there is no escape.
The X-Files: Perihelion is available now wherever books are sold.