The X-Files revival concludes tonight, though Fox desperately wants to keep hopes for more episodes alive. But believers can still get their fix of Dana Scully and Fox Mulder…as teenagers. Entertainment Weekly announced the upcoming X-Files Origins series, a pair of YA novels that will follow 15-year-old Dana Scully and 17-year-old Fox Mulder. Titled Agent Of Chaos and Devil’s Advocate respectively, the two novels are both set in the spring of 1979, when lil’ teen Scully and lil’ teen Mulder first experience the life-altering events that eventually pave the way to their adult lives as FBI agents.
Agent Of Chaos—which is Mulder’s book, if you couldn’t tell from the title—will be written by Kami Garcia, co-author of the Caster Chronicles, which includes the New York Times bestseller Beautiful Creatures, and author of The Legion series. Scully’s book, Devil’s Advocate, will be written by New York Times-bestselling thriller and horror novelist Jonathan Maberry, author of Dead Of Night and Patient Zero. The X-Files Origins novels will get to the roots of both Mulder and Scully and how they eventually came to be the believer and skeptical medical doctor they are in the series. We’re guessing they were pretty much exactly the same as teenagers, just even angstier than the angsty adults they become. Only they didn’t have each other to channel their frustrations through back then.
The series was acquired by Imprint/Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group, and both books are set to publish simultaneously in January 2017. “When I watched the pilot episode back in 1993, I became immediately obsessed with The X-Files,” Erin Stein, publisher of Imprint, said in a statement. “As a die-hard fan of the show, the opportunity to work with incredible authors on original stories about these characters is a dream come true for me. Why did Mulder become a believer? Why did Scully become a skeptic? We get to tell those stories.” We think the bigger question is, did 15-year-old Dana Scully love pantsuits as much as present-day Dana Scully?