Book review: The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer

I wouldn’t expect too much from movie tie-ins as they’re not by the same writers who invented the characters and scenes in the filmed stories. However, this was written by the daughter of the main (co-)director of the TV box set and so I was hoping for it to not just be a cash-in but provide more material in the same dreamy style, reveal answers from the dead and ideally include something new that the viewers hadn’t pieced together about this strange tribe of people with 1980s haircuts.

What did I want to find in here, specifically? More about the quirky characters, preferably with some new characters just as strange and elusive. More eerie catch phrases, beamed from outer space. Some insight into the supernatural ‘Bob’ and his formation, motivations (he speaks English so presumably went to school somewhere). I hoped for new randomness and ideas ‘from outta left field’. There was none of this, so it wasn’t original enough in that area and didn’t live up to the TV version, where every episode delights us with something unguessably new ‘from the mind of David Lynch’.

I knew that the victim was supposed to be unsympathetic, a druggie promiscuous type who apparently colluded in her own death by submitting to the primitive force in the woods, which I assumed to be the result of small town boredom. I should have realised, having heard in the original show the tapes the character dictated, that this is a poorly acted and wooden character, so not the best choice or most multi-layered member of the cast to try to write a full spin-off book about. Neither is Dale Cooper of course, not because he isn’t interesting but because when asked “Do you have any secrets, Agent Cooper?”, he replies “No”, so that’s that.

I watched a sci-fi movie called The Fourth Kind (2009), with Mila Jojovich, in which people abducted by aliens transposed the memory of seeing owls with having encountered aliens. Only by discovering Twin Peaks and hearing the phrase “The owls are not what they seem” did I realise where this common abduction meme of seeing subtly-wrong owls came from, i.e. fiction.

I’m not going to read any more of these commercial tie-ins. Just watch the show and leave it there, that’s my advice. This book gets One Peak then back to the charity shop.