Welcome to Season Three!
“I have no idea where this will lead us, but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange.” – Agent Dale Cooper
I am equal parts apprehensive and excited for the all-new, 18-episode return of Twin Peaks scheduled to air starting at the end of May.
Will it be good? Will it be disappointing? Is twenty-five years too long of a hiatus? Will this be better than the equally-anticipated return of The X-Files? Will we get any answers?
Whether these episodes end up being triumphant or disappointing to fans, this Twin Peaks-y book list will be here for you at the end of it all—to either help you keep that peculiar Twin Peaks spirit alive, or to help wash away the nasty percolator-fish taste of regret.
This clever experimental novel is pure Lynch: a hypnotic, creepy, cryptic tone, overlapping/recurring phrases and images, multiple perspectives that tease the reader with what is real and what imagined, coincidences, logical impossibilities, the making public of private spaces, the shattering of expectations. It’s a cult masterpiece of the highest order and you can almost hear the Badalamenti soundtrack in your head.
A small town in which surreal and bizarre things occur regularly, with shifting points of view from a variety of characters whose lives and obsessions all revolve around one woman, upon whom they have heaped their hopes and desires and love and hate, who is never given a voice of her own (or even a name), and about whom we know only what others need her to symbolize. Kaleidoscopic, erotic, weird. Sound familiar?
A panoramic view of a small town in Oregon, and all the ways in which the lives of its inhabitants cross, overlap, and collide, told through a chorus of voices, including a wise crow and a river. This is the Lucy-and-Andy side of Twin Peaks, with all of the quirky charm of living in a town with a bit of magic and some likable oddballs, but before Lynch has arrived to expose its horrible and terrifying underbelly.
A Man Came Out of a Door in the Mountain
This takes place in British Columbia, the home of One-Eyed-Jack’s. Like Twin Peaks, it centers on a small, insular town where girls go missing, teenagers live fully independent lives with little adult supervision, and the Devil arrives to walk among them, leading them into temptation. It’s dark magical realism with folklorist tones, less quirky than TP, but with a strong sense of location and a similar vibe overall.
If you’re a fan of the show, you’re pretty much required to read this near-future apocalypse tale, in which climate change threatens the Pacific Northwest, and, with a science fiction/multiverse flourish, an alt-history of Seattle is magically woven which includes aliens, gigantic flowers, and most importantly, Special Agent Dale Cooper himself. Come for the timber, stay for the Cooper.
Another small, weird town, Karen? This is such lazy readers’ advisory! True, but this is a small, weird town whose story is told through a blend of mystery and horror elements with otherworldly threats, PLUS this plot point: “A boy literally disappears from Main Street. A security camera captures the moment of his instant, inexplicable vanishing.” Which isn’t quite what happens to Phillip Jeffries, but close enough.
Dark and enigmatic, this novel begins with an investigation into the death of the beautiful and mysterious daughter of Stanislas Cordova; a famously reclusive director of disturbing cult horror films, before it explodes into a much larger matryoshka-style investigation of the conspiracies, death, and madness surrounding the secretive Cordova and his films. It is unsettling and plot-shifting in all the best ways.
This doesn’t have the same eerie, slipstream style as Twin Peaks, but if the thing you liked most about TP was the murder of a pretty, popular girl who was full of secrets, and the discovery of those secrets through the perspectives of people who thought they knew her, here you go! This also contains the POV of the girl before she was killed, so it’s like watching TP and then reading The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer.
Weird people, weird town, weird paranormal presence; it’s Stephen King, you know what to expect. The TV show was a trainwreck, but the book is a good example of what still brings readers to King’s table: he knows how to take a smalltown, folksy setting and slowly steep it in horror until the everyday is saturated with creepiness. Like Season 2 of TP, this could use some plot-corralling, but it’s still a fun ride.
Makes the cut on mood alone. Dara consistently serves up a Lynchian atmosphere where everything appears normal, until it’s not, and the shift is pleasantly disorienting. A pervasive sense of dread underscores his work that reads like Lynch’s trademark half-acknowledged hum; ordinary events are infused with eeriness and the questions won’t always have answers, but its ominous tone will linger long after reading.
