28 August 2017

Review: The Secret History of Twin Peaks

The Secret History of Twin Peaks The Secret History of Twin Peaks by Mark Frost
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I am totally and completely obsessed with Twin Peaks right now, and having an hour of The Return every week just hasn’t been enough. Now we have The Secret history, written by David Lynch’s Peaks partner Mark Frost, that acts as a document dump of the weird happenings that led us to what happened in the show.

From a basic “this scratches an itch” standpoint, this was a wonderful diversion. So much going on here that I loved, from the tiny Easter eggs to giving a much fuller accounting of some of my favorite characters and moments. Frost litters in a lot of real history (Lewis and Clark factor heavily into the Peaks Mythos, it turns out) in with the information established by the show, and we end up with a lot of background into some of the more important characters. With that said, it’s not all coffee and cherry pie – there’s a lot of diversions into UFO culture and more basic conspiracy theories that not only don’t quite fit into the overall Peaks experience, but almost divert it away from there. Plus, if you’ve watched The Return, some key moments in the show (most notably the happenings in Episode 8), barely factor into this book at all. An odd choice, perhaps, but one that I would have liked to see resolved – and maybe it will be in the companion to this that’s releasing soon.

Overall, though? One big Agent Cooper thumbs-up from me on this one. A great companion to a classic show, and a solid guidebook to The Return on a whole.

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