Book #16: The X-Files: Skin by Ben Mezrich
Number of pages: 261
This fan fiction novel based on the hit series The X-Files opens with a patient dying on the operating table. Despite him not being the correct donor, his skin is used to provide a skin graft on another patient.
The story quickly goes into horror territory, as the patient is turned into a violent psychopath as a result of the skin graft, brutally murders a nurse and goes on a killing spree across New York.
I had forgotten most of what happened in this book, so definitely did not remember that the story eventually involved Mulder and Scully going to Thailand to track down a doctor who was perpetrating a series of Doctor Frankenstein-like experiments involving synthetic skin, using burn victims as guinea pigs and that it also involved a legendary "skin eater".
The story of this book allows a lot of scope for descriptions of gory scenes, and this book does it in very graphic detail, but - despite the simple plot - I didn't enjoy this novel as much as Kevin J. Anderson's X-Files novels, possibly because the writer wasn't quite so good at writing Mulder and Scully and making them feel three-dimensional, although the story does a good job of keeping things suspenseful.
This wasn't my favourite X-Files novelisation, but it is still worth reading, particularly as it did raise a few thought-provoking issues relating to medical ethics.
Next book: The Five Orange Pips and Other Cases (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)