This book is quite possibly the worst book I've ever read. The language is rudimentary at best, with Anderson's repetitious narrative grating on my nerves from the very beginning. He seems quite fond of certain descriptions, and as the subject of these descriptions are presented time and again, he reverts back to his original presentation of them, such as "her long face," or "sheafs of paper"-again and again throughout the book. The tone and framework of the writing is reminiscent of the Weekly Readers I was required to read as a student in the sixth grade. There were different levels and colors assigned to the books according to the student's reading skill, 1 being the beginner level and 4 being the moderately difficult level, using the primary palette as a compliment to this system. I would not be surprised to see this book being issued as a Yellow Stripe Level 2, sitting on the shelves of elementary schools across the country.
The storyline is weak and the characterization is completely off target. There are holes in the plot you could drive a Mack truck through. It is rare that I give such a scathing review, but this, I assure you is completely warranted. This book is not only insulting to X-Files fans, but to readers in general. I suppose one cannot expect much from a book that supports no critical acclaim of its own on the back cover, rather, but for the series solely responsible for its marginal success. Did no one have anything positive to say about this travesty? Not even the janitor at the New York Times? Not surprising.
From the first line, it was obvious this would be a waste of time and I struggled to even finish it. By page 22 I had already flagged 3 grammatical errors...and by the time I finished the book I had flagged 9 in all, unforgivable in a widely circulated published work. I can only hope the editor was asleep on the job, and not as incompetent as his/her work would suggest. One can only hope the other X-Files serial novels are not as ridiculously juvenile as Ground Zero.