What to Read Next, Based On Your Favorite Episode of The X-Files

I made this for myself first and foremost, but I hope it resonates with you too.

Mar 11, 2026

So if you don’t know this about me yet, The X-Files is pretty much my favorite television show of all time. I mean, my cat is named Scully.

I could talk for ages about how foundational TXF was to the horror and sci-fi genres following it, but I’ll spare you. Instead, I’ve put together some book recommendations based on a handful of my favorite episodes. You can expect a part 2, because there are so many more episodes I love and I know I can find equivalent book recs for.

Syzygy (3x13)

It’s a toss-up, but I do think this is one of my all-time favorite episodes. I love how campy it is, I love the teenage-girl-rage becoming a psychic, astrological force of nature. The satanic panic vibes, the witchy elements, it’s all so good. Also, guest-starring a practically-fetal Ryan Reynolds!

Bunny by Mona Awad

Samantha Heather Mackey couldn’t be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England’s Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort – a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other Bunny, and seem to move and speak as one.

But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies’ fabled Smut Salon, and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door--ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies’ sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus Workshop where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision.

Chinga (5x10)

This episode was written by Stephen King, and is a masterpiece, and the first thing I saw when googling it to get the episode number was a reddit post titled “can we all agree Chinga is the worst episode of the X Files?” and my blood pressure raised alarmingly. The worst??? Sir have you SEEN First Person Shooter?? (that slaps also tbh but it’s goofy as hell).

Anyways. Possessed evil doll causing a small child to do creepy things? Sign me up.

Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman

To eight-year-old Bela, her family is her world. There’s Mommy, Daddo, and Grandma Ruth. But there is also Other Mommy, a malevolent entity who asks her every day: “Can I go inside your heart?”

When horrifying incidents around the house signal that Other Mommy is growing tired of asking Bela the same question, over and over… Bela understands that unless she says yes, soon her family must pay.

Other Mommy is getting restless, stronger, bolder. Only the bonds of family can keep Bela safe but other incidents show cracks in her parents’ marriage. The safety Bela relies on is on the brink of unraveling. But Other Mommy needs an answer.

Miracle Man (1x18)

Small town cult/evangelical-type stories will always enthrall me. I loved Godshot so much, and I love this episode too. They aren’t exactly the same, but the vibes are there.

Godshot by Chelsea Bieker

Drought has settled on the town of Peaches, California. The area of the Central Valley where fourteen-year-old Lacey May and her alcoholic mother live was once an agricultural paradise. Now it’s an environmental disaster, a place of cracked earth and barren raisin farms. In their desperation, residents have turned to a cult leader named Pastor Vern for guidance. He promises, through secret “assignments,” to bring the rain everybody is praying for.

Lacey has no reason to doubt the pastor. But then her life explodes in a single unimaginable act of abandonment: her mother, exiled from the community for her sins, leaves Lacey and runs off with a man she barely knows. Abandoned and distraught, Lacey May moves in with her widowed grandma, Cherry, who is more concerned with her taxidermy mice collection than her own granddaughter. As Lacey May endures the increasingly appalling acts of men who want to write all the rules, and begins to uncover the full extent of Pastor Vern’s shocking plan to bring fertility back to the land, she decides she must go on a quest to find her mother, no matter what it takes. With her only guidance coming from the romance novels she reads and the unlikely companionship of the women who knew her mother, she must find her own way through unthinkable circumstances.

Die Hand Die Verletzt (2x14)

Satanic Panic babyyyyyy. Although, in this case, they were kinda right… As aforementioned, I love a good small town cult story. And I love raining toads. :)

Crafting for Sinners by Jenny Kiefer

Ruth is trapped. She’s stuck in her small, religious hometown of Kill Devil, Kentucky, stuck in the closet, and stuck living paycheck to paycheck. After her manager finds out that she lives with her girlfriend, Ruth is fired from her job as a cashier at New Creations—a craft store owned by the church that dominates life in the town.

In an act of revenge, Ruth attempts to shoplift some yarn but is caught red-handed by a New Creations cashier. Instead of calling the police, the employees lock her in the store—and attack her. When Ruth is forced to stab out one of their eyes with a knitting needle, she realizes she’s facing far bigger trouble than a simple shoplifting charge. As Ruth fights for her life, she plunges deeper into the tangled web of the New Creationists, who are hiding a terrible secret that threatens not only her, but the entire town.

Arcadia (6x15)

This episode is so dumb, I love it. It’s really not, actually, it’s just that the setup has Mulder and Scully playing house in a “forced proximity, only one bed” rom-com scenario and I do love that. Arcadia is ultimately an episode about doing whatever you feel needs to be done to protect the so-called sanctity of your utopian community, and it fits in perfectly with Direct Descendant.

Direct Descendent by Tanya Huff

Generations ago, the founders of the idyllic town of Lake Argen made a deal with a dark force. In exchange for their service, the town will stay prosperous and successful, and keep outsiders out. And for generations, it’s worked out great. Until a visitor goes missing, and his wealthy family sends a private investigator to find him, and everything abruptly goes sideways.

Now, Cassidy Prewitt, town baker and part-time servant of the dark force (it’s a family business) has to contend with a rising army of darkness, a very frustrated town, and a very cute PI who she might just be falling for… and who might just be falling for her. And if they can survive their own home-grown apocalypse, they might even just find happiness together.

Darkness Falls (1x20)

I think about Scully’s coat in this episode all the time. Anyways, if you don’t like bugs, I would skip both this episode and this book! If you can handle it, welcome in. It’s about bugs that eat people. That’s about it.

Wolf Worm by T. Kingfisher

The year is 1899 and Sonia Wilson is a scientific illustrator without work, prospects, or hope. When the reclusive Dr. Halder offers her a position illustrating his vast collection of insects, Sonia jumps at the chance to move to his North Carolina manor house and put her talents to use. But soon enough she finds that there are darker things at work than the Carolina woods. What happened to her predecessor, Halder’s wife? Why are animals acting so strangely, and what is behind the peculiar local whispers about “blood thiefs?”

With the aid of the housekeeper and a local healer, Sonia discovers that Halder’s entomological studies have taken him down a dark road full of parasitic maggots that burrow into human flesh, and that his monstrous experiments may grow to encompass his newest illustrator as well.

Detour (5x04)

I’ve realized that most of my favorite X-Files episodes are ones that include goofy, light-hearted interpersonal exchanges between Mulder and Scully. I’ll be honest, this probably makes me a fake fan, but I could take or leave the serious, mythology-arc stuff. Give me monster of the week forever.

Detour is ultimately about the natural world fighting back against endless land development, which feels right in line with my book choice.

The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister

Since time immemorial, the Haddesley family has tended the cranberry bog. In exchange, the bog sustains them. The staunch seasons of their lives are governed by a strict covenant that is renewed each generation with the ritual sacrifice of their patriarch, and in return, the bog produces a “bog-wife.” Brought to life from vegetation, this woman is meant to carry on the family line. But when the bog fails—or refuses—to honor the bargain, the Haddesleys, a group of discordant siblings still grieving the mother who mysteriously disappeared years earlier, face an unknown future.

Middle child Wenna, summoned back to the dilapidated family manor just as her marriage is collapsing, believes the Haddesleys must abandon their patrimony. Her siblings are not so easily persuaded. Eldest daughter Eda, de facto head of the household, seeks to salvage the compact by desecrating it. Younger son Percy retreats into the wilderness in a dangerous bid to summon his own bog-wife. And as youngest daughter Nora takes desperate measures to keep her warring siblings together, fledgling patriarch Charlie uncovers a disturbing secret that casts doubt over everything the family has ever believed about itself.