The X-Files: Origins Books in Order

Jonathan Maberry's entry in The X-Files: Origins line focuses on a smart question, not what Dana Scully is like once she becomes the adult skeptic viewers know, but what kinds of events could have pushed her toward that skepticism in the first place. Devil's Advocate is set in 1979, with a teenage Scully newly uprooted by her father's military career and dropped into a place where life already feels uncertain before the real mystery even begins.

That is a strong way in.

Dana is fifteen here, which matters because she is young enough to be shaken by what she sees but already wired to observe, question, and test things. Maberry builds the story around disturbing dreams, a dead classmate who seems to point toward darker truths, suspicious deaths, and a steady sense that evil may be more real than Dana wants it to be. The book is not trying to turn her into a full teen action hero version of later Scully. It is more interested in the earlier emotional and intellectual pressure that shapes who she becomes.

The result lands somewhere between paranormal mystery and coming-of-age thriller. You can see the franchise DNA clearly, occult rumor, unexplained violence, hints of conspiracy, and the tension between belief and evidence. But because this is Scully before the FBI, the scale feels more intimate. She is working through fear, faith, family displacement, and the shock of realizing that the world may not run on the rules she hoped it did.

That smaller scale helps.

It gives the book room to be about Dana rather than just about franchise iconography. Maberry understands that the most useful origin story is not one that crams in every future reference. It is one that lets a familiar character face a problem that feels formative. Here, that means confronting evil without yet having the training, authority, or professional language that adult Scully will later develop.

So if you are using this page to decide what kind of X-Files story this is, think less monster-of-the-week and more character-rooted supernatural mystery. You still get eerie atmosphere and the franchise's usual pull between the uncanny and the explainable. But the real draw is seeing Dana Scully at the point where belief, fear, and reason start fighting for space inside the same young mind.

For longtime fans, that is the hook. For newer readers, it also works perfectly well as a stand-alone YA thriller about a bright teenager learning that surviving a mystery is not the same thing as understanding it.