The Secret History of Twin Peaks

Yes, Mark Frost's 2016 novel bridges the roughly 25-year gap between the original Twin Peaks series that ended in 1991 and the 2017 Showtime revival, 'Twin Peaks: The Event Series.' The dossier covers historical events intertwined with the show's mythology, including nuclear testing in the 1940s and government conspiracies involving characters like Major Garland Briggs and Douglas Milford.

The novel is generally treated as canon because it was written by Mark Frost, who co-created the series with David Lynch. However, Frost published a follow-up novel, 'Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier,' in 2017 to reconcile developments from the Showtime revival and address minor inconsistencies that emerged between the book and the televised third season.

The book is structured as a dossier — a curated collection of classified government documents, newspaper clippings, diary entries, and letters compiled by an unidentified archivist. This epistolary format includes footnotes and annotations, and weaves real historical figures like Richard Nixon, Lewis and Clark, and L. Ron Hubbard into the fictional Twin Peaks mythology.

It is not required, as the 2017 Showtime revival stands on its own as a Lynch-directed work, but the novel enriches the viewing experience by providing backstory on characters like Major Briggs and the Bookhouse Boys. Several plot threads from the dossier — particularly those related to nuclear testing and the nuclear-adjacent mythology of Episode 8 — are directly referenced in the revival.