What can I say about Twin Peaks?  It was…is…a TV show that is near and dear to my heart.  I’d seen Dune (1984), but Twin Peaks was really my introduction to David Lynch, and I never looked back.  I’d seen a few ads for the show, but didn’t end up seeing it until I randomly tuned in during summer re-runs.  It was the scene where Cooper & the gang were out in the woods with a chalkboard, a bottle, and some rocks.  Cooper starts talking about Tibet and whatnot, and I was done.  The show spoke my kind of weird.  I watched the whole run and was crushed when it was canceled.  I’m pretty sure Fire Walk With Me (1992) didn’t play at my local theater, so I caught it on VHS, and like a lot of people at the time, I was baffled and frustrated.  I’ve never much cared for prequels, and I sure didn’t want to watch in excruciating detail as Laura traveled down her final dark hallway.  Still, I could re-watch the show, and did so several times.  I’ve said for years that watching Twin Peaks felt like going home to a home I never had.  It felt like a place where I belonged in a way I never felt in my hometown.  Fast-forward a couple decades and Lynch and Frost returned with The Return in 2017.  It took me a couple years, but I got a chance to sit down and watch it, and was captivated again, in a different way. 

In conjunction with The Return, Mark Frost also produced two books, the first of which is this, The Secret History of Twin Peaks.  The second, The Final Dossier is on my shelf, to be read at some point.  What Frost has created is a diegetic document.  It is a collection of material that pieces together the weird history of at least one aspect of the titular town of Twin Peaks, Washington.  I don’t know how much of what each creator contributed to the original show and its lore.  I will say that the material contained in this book feels true to the show’s universe, but doesn’t have much of a Lynch vibe to it, even when things get weird.  That’s not a good or a bad thing.  Just a thing to note.

Per the conceit of the book, a collection of documents were found in a lockbox, created by a mysterious Archivist.  That material is then verified and commented upon by an equally mysterious FBI agent, largely in footnotes.  I’m a sucker for this kind of thing.  I love diegetic materials, be it music, art, books, or whatever.  I enjoy them as they are, but I also always float the idea of using them as handouts in a tabletop RPG, too.  Like, if I were going to run a game based on Twin Peaks, I’d definitely love to be able to hand this book to a player, maybe with a few extra notes & images tucked into the pages, and let them reference it as they will over the course of the game, perhaps finding clues to help them in their story.  

As a general overview, the story goes back to the Lewis & Clark expedition, then moves up to the founding of Twin Peaks as a lumber town.  From there, we move up to what I guess becomes the sort of main thrust, or closest thing to a protagonist you might find in the book, Douglas Milford.  Through the occasional lens of Milford’s life, we connect to strange goings on well beyond the limits of Twin Peaks.  Milford gets wrapped up in conspiracies, UFOs, assassinations, the atomic bomb, Richard Nixon, and more.  While I enjoyed much of this material, and I like the general expansion of the Twin Peaks lore, I came to the book hoping more specifically for something that dove deep into the town itself.  Over the course of the book, we are given a lot of tantalizing glimpses, but I wanted more of that, and maybe less of the globe trotting adventures in backroom politics and chicanery.  

The back half of the book does start to refocus on Twin Peaks and its strange inhabitants.  We start to see more of the building blocks of the community that I grew to love in the show.  Though again, this is where I’d have loved to see more of the weirder aspects of the town.  They’re touched on several times, but often briefly and without going into depth or detail.  There is a lot about all the various players in the Paccard Sawmill saga, going deeper into Andrew, Josie, Catherine, and the rest.  Certainly a major element of the greater story, and weird in its way.  Though its way is more soap opera (not meant disparagingly), and less Lynchian weird.  There’s also more on the Bookhouse Boys, and some of the complicated emotional entanglements surrounding various members of that club.  

Even though it isn’t the direction I hoped the book would go in, a lot of the stuff linking Milford and various historic (& rumored) events and people is very cool, and gave me some stuff to read further into.  I was frequently reminded of the excellent Call of Cthulhu sourcebooks for Delta Green made in the 90s (later re-worked and updated into a separate tabletop RPG of its own, by the same name).  This only increased my desire to, at some point, run a Twin Peaks inspired game.  One day.  

For a Twin Peaks fan, I think this is absolutely one to check out.  That said, at time of writing, the book is out of print.  It’s available on the collectors’ market for an unseemly fee, and I would absolutely not recommend spending the well over $100. USD on it.  I’ve never been a library person.  I respect and tip my cap to libraries and the folks who run them, but because of the way my brain works and how slow I am at reading, I’ve always been a buyer of books.  Especially when there was a used bookstore around the corner, and the library was on the other side of town.  But here we are.  I found out that my local library had a copy and checked it out.  They even auto-renewed my checkout, because I was going to run over my allotted time by a few days.  Awesome.  Would I like to have this in my collection, especially to use as a handout for running a tabletop RPG?  Sure.  But I’m also glad I didn’t pay a ton of money for the privilege.  Support your local library!  

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