Darkness Falls Book

“When you mess with nature, justice turns blind. And everybody gets punished.” —– Mulder

Although not found anywhere in the broadcast episode, the above line from Mulder is thought-provoking and brilliantly made with environmental ethics in mind. In this X-Files novelization of “Darkness Falls," Agents Mulder and Scully travel to Washington state to investigate the strange disappearance of a team of loggers working deep in the Olympic National Forest. Although eco-terrorism is initially suspected, the agents soon find themselves trapped by a seemingly ancient menace lurking in the dense woodland.

Sure, the killer-bug idea is nothing new, but the plot is certainly compelling, providing young audiences with a bonafide survival horror thriller. In fact, the deadly insect swarm works better here than on television because readers are left to imagine the terrifying prospect of being attacked by these unearthly mites—as opposed to relying on CGI pixels to sell the scare. Given that this show was produced in the earlier 90s, the greenly swarm was hardly an impressive visual. Much like the show's earlier installment, "Ice" (inspired by John Carpenter's The Thing), "Darkness Falls" strands the dynamic agents and a team of auxiliary characters in a remote location where they are pitted against mind-boggling horrors. And not everyone makes it out alive.

Topping in at just over a hundred-pages, the book is written for a middle-grade audience. Like most other X-Files novelizations, much of the scientific dialogue is reduced or carefully expounded so as to be more accessible to younger readers. The book contains a lot of additional dialogue not found in the episode, some especially interesting exchanges between the guest cast—Larry Moore, Doug Spinney, and Steve Humphreys—that lends a greater dimension to their one-shot characters. As an avid fan of the TV series, much of what I’ve enjoyed about re-reading these juvenile adaptations is these added scenes and dialogue that feel much like the bonus deleted scenes one finds on a DVD. On the other hand, the story’s pacing is rather hampered by some of this supplementary material, and occasionally the excess dialogue doesn’t ring true to what we know of Mulder and Scully. If you remove all the added content, the book would’ve been at least ten pages shorter. Again, I’m not complaining, as most of the bonus material in this book complements the story.

Darkness Falls plays to our most primal of terrors—fear of the dark and the nightmarish entities lurking amidst the shadows. Right from the get-go, a palpable sense of dread and doom is evoked from the book's opening lines, in the dreary descriptions of the dense forest and low fog snaking through the tree trunks. Still, the book's hardly a worthwhile read unless you’re deeply vested in The X-Files and yearning to recapture the nostalgia of a series past in a different medium, then in which case consider giving this meager book a try.