So today having been 1013, I was feeling nostalgic and decided to try out
The X-Files™: Trust No One, a recent anthology of newly-written tie-in stories for the show edited by
Jonathan Maberry, which I got in last year's X-Files Humble Comics Bundle from IDW, as one of the two prose books in it. Most of them were by established horror authors (many well-known genre award-winners), and ranged from fairly decent to pretty good. Some of them would have made perfectly cromulent TV episodes; others wouldn't have been filmable but were good character/setting pieces.
Mind you, some of them seemed to just be showcases for the authors' pet ideas, pushing established character and continuity well to the background. YMMV, but I personally think that a) the window of opportunity for doing topically timely mocking meta-commentary about the Twilight franchise with an expy teen hit series leading to delusional fans probably passed somewhere around 2012 and no1curr as of 2015, b) if one still wanted to try, they should have gone with a parody of Fifty Shades of Grey (Aliens
) since that was the next pearl-clutching bad-for-the-obliviously-shallow-readership series that the media moved onto concern-trolling about, and c) Scully has no room to cast stones about bestselling entertainment reading material of dubious literary merit, considering that she's known to read the trashy-sounding thriller novels of
Jose Chung. And as usual, US writers get Canada rather wrong, and for the record, Ottawa is not a province, if that's what you meant by repeatedly using it that way in the "location and date" header that the cases sometimes have.
Aside from that, and a few other similar missteps by authors who sometimes seemed to not get the lead characters and how they would plausibly react in keeping with their established personalities, or putting in levels of hinting about future developments in the show for some of the pieces set at certain points in the past which made them look like they knew too much, too soon about what was going to happen to them, this had a good mix of different story ideas and styles and settings, even if there seemed to be a whole bunch of disgruntled ex-military research scientists out for revenge. And there was some bonus variety with a couple of stories starring A.D. Skinner, a pre-series team-up between Mulder and his predecessor Agent Arthur Dales, and a story written from the POV of a regular FBI agent who has Mulder & Scully come in on a serial killer case and Mulder spout his weird hypotheses all over the place, which is always fun to see how outsiders view these things.
Recommended if you're a fan of the series. I was pleased to read Stefan Petrucha's thoughtful and contemplative contribution, as I always quite liked the stories he wrote for the old Topps tie-in comics, and Kevin J. Anderson, tie-in writer extraordinaire, provided his usual solidly serviceable fare. It seems that this has done well enough in the sales that IDW has put out at least two more anthologies of such, and I'll have to see if the library has, or they go on sale at some point.