the-secret-history-of-twin-peaks-cover-mark-frostby Mark Frost

Pan Macmillan, out now

Diane, am investigating a new novel by Twin Peaks co-creator Mark Frost where he dives into the history of the eponymous North-Western town. It’s a tome that pleases and frustrates in equal measures. What follows is my summation.

For a show with such cult status as Twin Peaks, very little has been written as an official tie-in. Sure, we’ve had The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, The Autobiography of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper and faux travel guide Welcome to Twin Peaks: An Access Guide to the Town, in addition to countless intellectual theses and academia on the meaning of the show. So it was with great excitement that fans greeted the news that not only was there going to be a history of the town, but written by one of its creators. And at that stage I, like most fans, decided what was going to be in the book. It was going to fill in the 25 years between the show finishing and the new 2017 series. It was going to answer all those outstanding questions that had been bugging us since the possessed/deranged Agent Cooper banged his head against the mirror, chanting ‘How’s Annie?’ But then that in itself would have robbed the new series of this rich vein of material. The sooner you realise you won’t get many answers, the sooner you can enjoy the book in your hands.

So, enough about what the book isn’t, and more about what you actually get. From a design perspective it’s a beautifully-pieced book, styled like a dossier of paper clippings, reports and diary entries, annotated by a third-hand reader. But rather than this being a random selection of Twin Peaks paraphernalia, there’s still a deliberate narrative running through it. In its pages we learn about the initial dwellers of the town, first-hand reports of mysterious encounters around Douglas firs and sycamore trees, the sightings of bulbous-headed giants and the appearance of owls.

So far, so Twin Peaks, but then it goes a bit X-Files. A large chunk is dedicated to the Roswell cover-up, the debunking of UFO sightings, paranoia and conspiracies at the highest places. Frost clearly had a whale of a time weaving in most of the 20th Century’s biggest ‘unexplained mysteries’, which is great fun, and I won’t reveal the many pop culture references he weaves in, but they just don’t feel very Twin Peaks. They feel like they would be more at home in one of Jane Goldman’s X-Files Book of the Unexplained or Arthur C Clarke’s Mysterious World. But then we get some back story to the ancestors of characters from the show and it steers back on course again. We get to find out how characters initially hooked up and why they are the way there are; these sections are the most satisfying, adding a level of granularity that only a co-creator could (should?) add to the series’ canon.

It’s a pleasure reading about the Double R Diner, why they sell that ‘damn fine coffee’ and why this is the chosen destination for pies ‘when they die’. We reacquaint ourselves with Hank and Norma, Ed and Nadine, the long-standing feud between the Packards and Martells, Dr Jacoby (now we know why he wears those glasses), Audrey Horne and more. And what’s particularly satisfying is the occasional throw forward where we discover what happens to a character who clearly won’t be in the 2017 series due to their fate that has been sealed in the intervening years. Oh, and there’s a lovely bit of back story on how the Log Lady got her… log!

For the big Twin Peaks fan or completist it is of course a must-buy. The casual viewer could easily pass on this. Those looking for answers are likely to be disappointed – Messrs Lynch and Frost have never thrown out easy answers or resolutions, so it was unlikely that they ‘d use a tie-in book to provide the grand reveals, especially when they have a full season of shows ahead of them to accomplish this.

One line review: ‘The owls are not what they seem.’ I guess we already knew that, but as epistolary novels go, this is a fun diversion until the show proper returns next year. 7/10

Nick Joy

Click here to order from Amazon.co.uk