Re: 'Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier' Novel by Mark Frost 10/31 (SPOILERS)
Posted: Fri Nov 03, 2017 6:03 am
This feels more like a long epilogue to S2 and S3 (and, to a lesser extent, to TSHoTP) than a (very short) book in its own right. Mark seems self-aware about this: he described it as “dessert” in the Variety interview. I enjoyed it in that capacity. On the one hand, I missed the scope of TSHoTP, the passionate research and fastidious visual design. OTOH, this book felt more interested in engaging with the old show than either TSH or S3 did, which was oddly refreshing, and had fewer continuity clashes and more attention to detail than TSH when it came to established canon. On the other OTHER hand, TSH — for all its retconning — felt like it engaged with characters like Big Ed and Norma in a more personal way because we were hearing the story through the eyes of those who knew and loved them, whereas TFD keeps us at arm’s length by filtering everything through Tammy. Which adds to the epilogue feel: It’s more like the “where are they now” sequence at the end of a movie like Animal House than a fully fleshed-out novel. The book doesn’t feel essential to the series, nor does it work as a unique stand-alone addition to the canon like TSHoTP did. But it is interesting as a hardcore fan to gain insight into Mark’s feelings about the inner lives of characters like Ben, and it’s fun to see minor characters from the old show like Ernie acknowledged and even given closure. (I think Dick Tremayne is probably the most major character from the old show not to be mentioned in either of the new books or S3).
It seems like I was on the right track with this post from several months ago: viewtopic.php?f=34&t=3452&p=109533&hili ... er#p109533. The ending of the book, at least, seems interested in exploring memory loss on a global scale. However, the retcon-of-a-retcon vis a vis Norma’s backstory seemingly plays against this theme, turning what seemed to be an instance of reality slipping into an elaborately explained “realistic” and (more or less) internally consistent reconciling of the seeming contradictions. Maybe this just adds to the ambiguity?
In any event, while I prefer to believe that Dale only succeeded for a second before the timeline reverted to normal (Mark himself has said it’s an act of hubris to think you can change time), this “mushy reality” approach works well for the themes of memory and time passing that Mark was exploring in the books. I don’t know that I accept it as the definitive interpretation of what happened in the series, but since we’re dealing with (possibly overlapping) alternate realities at this point, there may not HAVE to be one definitive interpretation. It’s left ambiguous in the book whether Tammy’s world is transitioning toward a new timeline where Laura didn’t die, or will be continually stuck “between two worlds,” not sure which version of the past to believe...or if this discrepancy is confined solely to the Twin Peaks area or is something that will eventually radiate outward like a mushroom cloud over the entire world.
I know a lot of people preferred the Tammy characterization in TSH to the series interpretation, but I had the opposite experience. I found Tammy in TSH an unnecessarily convoluted and one-dimensional narrative device, and found Wersching’s performance on the audiobook extremely grating. However, I pictured Bell’s version while reading TFD and found her a lot more likable and real. The biggest flaw in writing her character this time around was all the forced “philosophizing” (the “Final Thoughts” chapter, with paragraph after paragraph of existential questions painfully trying to sum up the book’s themes, is the worst example).
I’m seemingly in the minority in that I actually liked the Norma/Vivian section of the book best, possibly just because it felt the most like an actual story as opposed to quickly tying up loose ends. I sort of doubt that Mark had this development in mind when he wrote TSH — I think it more likely that he conceived the story after fans pointed out his error (note that the major discrepancies in the Ed/Nadine backstory in TSH remain) — but I also wouldn’t be terribly surprised to be proven wrong. Either way, I enjoyed the way he gleefully embraced soap opera conventions to craft an intentionally convoluted tragic backstory. There are some inevitable issues (in the show Annie says she slit her wrists over a boyfriend she had senior year, which is an odd way of referring to her stepfather raping her), but overall it feels a lot more like Mark went back and watched the original show this time.
I’ve never understood those who thought Annie’s fate was a central cliffhanger — “How’s Annie?” wasn’t actually ABOUT Annie. I never particularly cared about getting an answer. What we got is...fine (to coin a phrase). I actually had a more optimistic interpretation than others: the book seems to indicate that Annie has an active inner life and has simply chosen to retreat inside herself, as if she has finally let go of her desire to try to integrate into a world that confuses and overwhelms her. Is that depressing? Sure. But in her own way, I think she actually is fine.
There’s a slight misogynistic streak in the the way the book portrays Vivian and Lana’s social-climbing ambitions and husband-hopping. Vivian is admittedly a monster for the way she treats Annie, but the book (or Tammy at least) seems to also vilify Vivian for breaking up Norma’s family while placing comparatively little blame on Norma’s dad. (Interesting that Norma left that Mar-T up at the diner for all these years in light of this backstory.) And calling Lana “trash” among other unkind implications seems totally unwarranted. She’s a terrible character, sure — and I’m not sure why Mark felt the need to bring her back aside from the Trump gag he obviously wanted to make — but she never did anything to hurt anyone as far as we know.
BTW, the evolution of the Trump bit is rather fascinating. Mark picked Dougie to star in TSHoTP for reasons that still aren’t quite clear to me (was he just a character of the correct approximate age Mark needed to tell the story? Was it the name echoing Dale’s tulpa/alter ego?). This of course meant that Lana had to at least be mentioned in TSHoTP. Mark then used Lana’s promiscuous nature to take a quick potshot at favorite target Trump. Subsequently, fans noted (and pointed out to Mark on Twitter) that Dougie was wearing a green ring when he died on the show. Mark responded cryptically, but my gut feeling (again) is that he incorporated this element after fans pointed it out to him, rather than having planned it while writing TSH. Meanwhile, on Twitter, he made a joke a few months ago about “45” having the jade ring...and lo and behold, all that had been written and shot before gave him the perfect vehicle to transfer the ring from Dougie to Donald! Again, maybe this was all carefully planned, but it strikes me more as a “Frank Silva in the mirror” type of thing. (Oddly, there is a continuity error even here: Mark says the ring was on Dougie’s bedside table when the show shows it on his hand!)
We know the Audrey chapter borrows from the character’s original scripted arc. I would guess that this is true of Donna as well (Fenn stated and Sabrina Southerland implied that there were plans to include Donna that didn’t work out). Donna’s story definitely plays as an attempt to incorporate/explain LFB’s obvious plastic surgery. It works fine as a final act for the character (who was irrevocably damaged emotionally by Laura’s death and obsessed with imitating Laura’s sexuality), but seems a bit tasteless/close to home in terms of writing this role for LFB. If this is what they came to her with, I can certainly understand why she refused (although it would have been a gutsy choice for her to play it and use the role to address all the undeserved shit she gets in tabloids and even on this board).
It’s strange to think about (but realistic) what profound repercussions the silly “Ben is Donna’s dad” storyline had on these characters’ lives over the course of decades.
Addressing the concept of the privatization of prisons feels a bit stale after the past few seasons of ‘Orange Is the New Black,’ but this is actually a concept Mark has been trying to bring to TP since the original run: the Access Guide has a two-page blueprint for a proposed prison by a shadowy architecture firm known as DLMF Creations (!!). I knew Mark would address the closing of the Mill and its effect on the town’s economy (although I wish this had gotten its own chapter — Catherine remains the only living main character from the original show not to have gotten any closure from either S3 or TFD. All we know from TSH is that she became reclusive). This is a depressing turn of events for our beloved town. Is a prison even that much of a revenue generator for a community? How many jobs can there possibly be, besides guards, some administrators? Local power and water utilities would presumably benefit and maybe expand operations. But would the prison really bring in that many jobs?
The Earle backstory has changed a lot in subtle ways from what we were told on the series — this is the part of TFD where I found the most discrepancies with the series. It says Earle was in custody for ten years, reaffirming the timeline from MLMT but contradicting the series. It says Coop didn’t meet Gordon until after Earle went boi-oi-oing, contradicting MLMT. Most incredibly, it removes the (admittedly silly) witness protection angle which has been part of every prior version of the story. (It also states that Earle co-founded Blue Rose with Gordon, which has never been stated anywhere else — elsewhere, the book is consistent with S3 in saying that Jeffries and Gordon cofounded the unit).
Mark really latched onto Jacoby in both new books and the series, both as a character (Mark clearly finds hippie/stoner jokes hilarious, a sign of his age and cultural sensibility) and as a mouthpiece for Mark’s political viewpoint. While Jacoby, under DKL’s direction, came off in S3 as a raving lunatic, Mark (or I should say Tammy) calls him a Magus. I enjoyed Jacoby a lot in both S3 (particularly his first few appearances; the Dr. Amp well eventually dried up) and in TSH (despite reservations about Mark’s whitewashing of the character, including retconning Laura’s age to 18). But I found the Jacoby chapter in TFD too reliant on pop culture and political references (Jacoby touring with the Dead made me groan). It was interesting to get some perspective on how widely-viewed/popular Jacoby’s show was, but overall, that chapter felt overly long.
The “I’ll spare you the details” of the Evelyn story feels like a swipe at the dubious quality of a storyline we know Harley Peyton conceived during Mark’s absence. To be fair, Mark has also made some self-aware jokes in the books about his own storylines (like acknowledging that he ripped off Body Heat). But poor Harley is taking a beating, between this and DKL saying season 2 sucked.
James’s storyline didn’t do much for me (the story about unwittingly becoming mechanic to a cartel made me think of Mr. Eddy and Pete Dayton), but the last paragraph was pretty heartbreaking, particularly the reference to him driving a Ford Focus now...really a succinct way of summing up the loss of youthful idealism and identity. It’s too bad his accident ended up being so anticlimactic after we were left wondering for months, though (a runaway coal cart?!).
The mythology stuff at the end reads as recap/cliffnotes for S3. I didn’t feel much if anything was added to what we saw onscreen regarding Hastings, Briggs, &c. It is a bit odd that Garland apparently had a spare corpse lying around when he went into hiding (in TSHoTP Tammy assumed, under very similar circumstances, that Andrew Packard had murdered a drifter — I guess she’s more inclined to give the Archivist the benefit of the doubt?).
I felt the Jeffries scene was reused too heavily in S3, and now we have a play-by-play recap in writing as well. It’s a bit much. It was a great short scene that was fun for fans to obsess over, but it’s been blown out of proportion in the narrative by this point, and it feels slightly cheapened for it. (Interestingly, Mark is going off TMP version of the scene, with Jeffries commenting on the year — retconned to 1989 as in TMP and S3).
The “Joudy” thing is weird. First of all, this contradicts DKL’s preferred spelling “Jowday” (according to Sabrina Southerland). It’s sort of odd that the two screenwriters wouldn’t agree on the spelling. Also, this is one of the moments where the book oddly seems to contradict S3: Tammy patiently explains the Judy/Joudy myth to Gordon, whereas in the series continuity Gordon had explained it to HER by this point! I haven’t been able to locate any source indicating that “Joudy” was a figure in Sumerian myth; this shoe-horning of the name into an historically inaccurate context contrasts with TSHoTP’s research-oriented use of real-world history and myth, which I sorely missed in TFD.
The book all but confirms my theory that Jeffries was Ray’s FBI “handler,” while keeping it ambiguous how much contact if any Gordon had with Jeffries over the years.
I wonder if DKL pays someone to read these books and summarize them before release so he can give feedback on what he doesn’t want revealed, or if he just prefers to remain blissfully unaware of what’s in them. I think the reveal that would most aggravate him (maybe I’m projecting) is the definitive statement that Sarah is 1956 girl. It is nice for those of us that caught the clues to be vindicated (especially since some posters felt we were reaching), but I loved the Schrödinger’s Sarah nature of the show’s approach, and find the explicit reveal kind of sad.
On the other hand, I’m so happy the book revealed that Becky lives! It would have been tragic to learn for certain that Bobby and Shelly had to deal with the loss of their daughter, but at least we would know and could come to terms with it. In a weird way, the not-knowing was the worst. Anyway, I’m glad to know she’s fine.
The Audrey material is handled pretty well, with the ambiguity of the series arc more or less preserved. The book does close off a couple of theories: Audrey is not still in a coma from the bank explosion (a theory Fenn rejected as well), and the book strongly implies that Charlie is, at least in one form, a seemingly mortal human being (her relationship with her accountant/husband sure sounds like Charlie, although he is never named, leaving some ambiguity). But the fact that Audrey disappears could mean that she is almost anywhere by the events of S3. It’s even possible that Mr. C took Audrey to the convenience store after raping her, as with Diane, and the Audrey Tammy is writing about who had been out in the real world is a tulpa. Is this part of the “contract” Audrey and Charlie had? That her tulpa would be given domain over her “real world” existence while Audrey remained in the Lodge, or deep in a mental hospital, or both (one in spirit, one in body)? Is Charlie a Lodge spirit after all? (Charlie and Red remain, I think, the most prominent “mortal” TP characters whose surnames aren’t revealed. And Red is notably entirely absent from TFD, preserving his ambiguity.)
BTW, since a few people have been talking about this: I don’t see any reason to believe that Audrey knows Cooper raped her. She was in a coma! While people in comas can be aware of their surroundings, there’s no reason to suspect that was the case here. She’s a strong-minded woman who got pregnant and decided to raise the child herself rather than asking for help. And it’s possible that she reached out to JJW and was unhappy with his response.
Based on what we know, the only person who could/should have pieced it together is Will, and it puts his character in a pretty compromised light that he waited 25 years to come forward with what he knew. We already know from TMP that he suspected something dark was going on in the Palmer house and turned a blind eye. Now we have a second instance of Will (a mandated reporter) not reporting an instance of rape of a minor. It definitely puts one of the most seemingly decent characters from the original show in a darker light. Did he tell Harry about Cooper leaving Audrey’s room? Did Harry tell anyone else? Did Will/Harry just figure it didn’t matter since Cooper was off the grid anyway? Mrrrh. Sorry, I’m off-topic.
Considering that Harry was one of the two leads of the original show, I wish we’d gotten a little more on him than one and a half pages of material we probably could have guessed at anyway (he kept searching for Dale, he has cancer). It was nice to learn that the plan is for Hawk to take over as sheriff, though.
The unsolved 1991 crime investigation mentioned in TSHoTP is never mentioned again. My theory is that Gordon was referring to Garland’s “murder” and this is just another instance of sketchy Frostian timekeeping.
Weird that all the stuff in the first book regarding parallels between the Lodge spirits and supposed alien sightings doesn’t pay off at all. TSH works fine on its own, but it felt like Mark was hiding the ball a bit due to not wanting to reveal anything about S3. It would have been nice to revisit the Nordics & greys &c. in light of what we learned about the Fireman, Judy & co.
It seems like I was on the right track with this post from several months ago: viewtopic.php?f=34&t=3452&p=109533&hili ... er#p109533. The ending of the book, at least, seems interested in exploring memory loss on a global scale. However, the retcon-of-a-retcon vis a vis Norma’s backstory seemingly plays against this theme, turning what seemed to be an instance of reality slipping into an elaborately explained “realistic” and (more or less) internally consistent reconciling of the seeming contradictions. Maybe this just adds to the ambiguity?
In any event, while I prefer to believe that Dale only succeeded for a second before the timeline reverted to normal (Mark himself has said it’s an act of hubris to think you can change time), this “mushy reality” approach works well for the themes of memory and time passing that Mark was exploring in the books. I don’t know that I accept it as the definitive interpretation of what happened in the series, but since we’re dealing with (possibly overlapping) alternate realities at this point, there may not HAVE to be one definitive interpretation. It’s left ambiguous in the book whether Tammy’s world is transitioning toward a new timeline where Laura didn’t die, or will be continually stuck “between two worlds,” not sure which version of the past to believe...or if this discrepancy is confined solely to the Twin Peaks area or is something that will eventually radiate outward like a mushroom cloud over the entire world.
I know a lot of people preferred the Tammy characterization in TSH to the series interpretation, but I had the opposite experience. I found Tammy in TSH an unnecessarily convoluted and one-dimensional narrative device, and found Wersching’s performance on the audiobook extremely grating. However, I pictured Bell’s version while reading TFD and found her a lot more likable and real. The biggest flaw in writing her character this time around was all the forced “philosophizing” (the “Final Thoughts” chapter, with paragraph after paragraph of existential questions painfully trying to sum up the book’s themes, is the worst example).
I’m seemingly in the minority in that I actually liked the Norma/Vivian section of the book best, possibly just because it felt the most like an actual story as opposed to quickly tying up loose ends. I sort of doubt that Mark had this development in mind when he wrote TSH — I think it more likely that he conceived the story after fans pointed out his error (note that the major discrepancies in the Ed/Nadine backstory in TSH remain) — but I also wouldn’t be terribly surprised to be proven wrong. Either way, I enjoyed the way he gleefully embraced soap opera conventions to craft an intentionally convoluted tragic backstory. There are some inevitable issues (in the show Annie says she slit her wrists over a boyfriend she had senior year, which is an odd way of referring to her stepfather raping her), but overall it feels a lot more like Mark went back and watched the original show this time.
I’ve never understood those who thought Annie’s fate was a central cliffhanger — “How’s Annie?” wasn’t actually ABOUT Annie. I never particularly cared about getting an answer. What we got is...fine (to coin a phrase). I actually had a more optimistic interpretation than others: the book seems to indicate that Annie has an active inner life and has simply chosen to retreat inside herself, as if she has finally let go of her desire to try to integrate into a world that confuses and overwhelms her. Is that depressing? Sure. But in her own way, I think she actually is fine.
There’s a slight misogynistic streak in the the way the book portrays Vivian and Lana’s social-climbing ambitions and husband-hopping. Vivian is admittedly a monster for the way she treats Annie, but the book (or Tammy at least) seems to also vilify Vivian for breaking up Norma’s family while placing comparatively little blame on Norma’s dad. (Interesting that Norma left that Mar-T up at the diner for all these years in light of this backstory.) And calling Lana “trash” among other unkind implications seems totally unwarranted. She’s a terrible character, sure — and I’m not sure why Mark felt the need to bring her back aside from the Trump gag he obviously wanted to make — but she never did anything to hurt anyone as far as we know.
BTW, the evolution of the Trump bit is rather fascinating. Mark picked Dougie to star in TSHoTP for reasons that still aren’t quite clear to me (was he just a character of the correct approximate age Mark needed to tell the story? Was it the name echoing Dale’s tulpa/alter ego?). This of course meant that Lana had to at least be mentioned in TSHoTP. Mark then used Lana’s promiscuous nature to take a quick potshot at favorite target Trump. Subsequently, fans noted (and pointed out to Mark on Twitter) that Dougie was wearing a green ring when he died on the show. Mark responded cryptically, but my gut feeling (again) is that he incorporated this element after fans pointed it out to him, rather than having planned it while writing TSH. Meanwhile, on Twitter, he made a joke a few months ago about “45” having the jade ring...and lo and behold, all that had been written and shot before gave him the perfect vehicle to transfer the ring from Dougie to Donald! Again, maybe this was all carefully planned, but it strikes me more as a “Frank Silva in the mirror” type of thing. (Oddly, there is a continuity error even here: Mark says the ring was on Dougie’s bedside table when the show shows it on his hand!)
We know the Audrey chapter borrows from the character’s original scripted arc. I would guess that this is true of Donna as well (Fenn stated and Sabrina Southerland implied that there were plans to include Donna that didn’t work out). Donna’s story definitely plays as an attempt to incorporate/explain LFB’s obvious plastic surgery. It works fine as a final act for the character (who was irrevocably damaged emotionally by Laura’s death and obsessed with imitating Laura’s sexuality), but seems a bit tasteless/close to home in terms of writing this role for LFB. If this is what they came to her with, I can certainly understand why she refused (although it would have been a gutsy choice for her to play it and use the role to address all the undeserved shit she gets in tabloids and even on this board).
It’s strange to think about (but realistic) what profound repercussions the silly “Ben is Donna’s dad” storyline had on these characters’ lives over the course of decades.
Addressing the concept of the privatization of prisons feels a bit stale after the past few seasons of ‘Orange Is the New Black,’ but this is actually a concept Mark has been trying to bring to TP since the original run: the Access Guide has a two-page blueprint for a proposed prison by a shadowy architecture firm known as DLMF Creations (!!). I knew Mark would address the closing of the Mill and its effect on the town’s economy (although I wish this had gotten its own chapter — Catherine remains the only living main character from the original show not to have gotten any closure from either S3 or TFD. All we know from TSH is that she became reclusive). This is a depressing turn of events for our beloved town. Is a prison even that much of a revenue generator for a community? How many jobs can there possibly be, besides guards, some administrators? Local power and water utilities would presumably benefit and maybe expand operations. But would the prison really bring in that many jobs?
The Earle backstory has changed a lot in subtle ways from what we were told on the series — this is the part of TFD where I found the most discrepancies with the series. It says Earle was in custody for ten years, reaffirming the timeline from MLMT but contradicting the series. It says Coop didn’t meet Gordon until after Earle went boi-oi-oing, contradicting MLMT. Most incredibly, it removes the (admittedly silly) witness protection angle which has been part of every prior version of the story. (It also states that Earle co-founded Blue Rose with Gordon, which has never been stated anywhere else — elsewhere, the book is consistent with S3 in saying that Jeffries and Gordon cofounded the unit).
Mark really latched onto Jacoby in both new books and the series, both as a character (Mark clearly finds hippie/stoner jokes hilarious, a sign of his age and cultural sensibility) and as a mouthpiece for Mark’s political viewpoint. While Jacoby, under DKL’s direction, came off in S3 as a raving lunatic, Mark (or I should say Tammy) calls him a Magus. I enjoyed Jacoby a lot in both S3 (particularly his first few appearances; the Dr. Amp well eventually dried up) and in TSH (despite reservations about Mark’s whitewashing of the character, including retconning Laura’s age to 18). But I found the Jacoby chapter in TFD too reliant on pop culture and political references (Jacoby touring with the Dead made me groan). It was interesting to get some perspective on how widely-viewed/popular Jacoby’s show was, but overall, that chapter felt overly long.
The “I’ll spare you the details” of the Evelyn story feels like a swipe at the dubious quality of a storyline we know Harley Peyton conceived during Mark’s absence. To be fair, Mark has also made some self-aware jokes in the books about his own storylines (like acknowledging that he ripped off Body Heat). But poor Harley is taking a beating, between this and DKL saying season 2 sucked.
James’s storyline didn’t do much for me (the story about unwittingly becoming mechanic to a cartel made me think of Mr. Eddy and Pete Dayton), but the last paragraph was pretty heartbreaking, particularly the reference to him driving a Ford Focus now...really a succinct way of summing up the loss of youthful idealism and identity. It’s too bad his accident ended up being so anticlimactic after we were left wondering for months, though (a runaway coal cart?!).
The mythology stuff at the end reads as recap/cliffnotes for S3. I didn’t feel much if anything was added to what we saw onscreen regarding Hastings, Briggs, &c. It is a bit odd that Garland apparently had a spare corpse lying around when he went into hiding (in TSHoTP Tammy assumed, under very similar circumstances, that Andrew Packard had murdered a drifter — I guess she’s more inclined to give the Archivist the benefit of the doubt?).
I felt the Jeffries scene was reused too heavily in S3, and now we have a play-by-play recap in writing as well. It’s a bit much. It was a great short scene that was fun for fans to obsess over, but it’s been blown out of proportion in the narrative by this point, and it feels slightly cheapened for it. (Interestingly, Mark is going off TMP version of the scene, with Jeffries commenting on the year — retconned to 1989 as in TMP and S3).
The “Joudy” thing is weird. First of all, this contradicts DKL’s preferred spelling “Jowday” (according to Sabrina Southerland). It’s sort of odd that the two screenwriters wouldn’t agree on the spelling. Also, this is one of the moments where the book oddly seems to contradict S3: Tammy patiently explains the Judy/Joudy myth to Gordon, whereas in the series continuity Gordon had explained it to HER by this point! I haven’t been able to locate any source indicating that “Joudy” was a figure in Sumerian myth; this shoe-horning of the name into an historically inaccurate context contrasts with TSHoTP’s research-oriented use of real-world history and myth, which I sorely missed in TFD.
The book all but confirms my theory that Jeffries was Ray’s FBI “handler,” while keeping it ambiguous how much contact if any Gordon had with Jeffries over the years.
I wonder if DKL pays someone to read these books and summarize them before release so he can give feedback on what he doesn’t want revealed, or if he just prefers to remain blissfully unaware of what’s in them. I think the reveal that would most aggravate him (maybe I’m projecting) is the definitive statement that Sarah is 1956 girl. It is nice for those of us that caught the clues to be vindicated (especially since some posters felt we were reaching), but I loved the Schrödinger’s Sarah nature of the show’s approach, and find the explicit reveal kind of sad.
On the other hand, I’m so happy the book revealed that Becky lives! It would have been tragic to learn for certain that Bobby and Shelly had to deal with the loss of their daughter, but at least we would know and could come to terms with it. In a weird way, the not-knowing was the worst. Anyway, I’m glad to know she’s fine.
The Audrey material is handled pretty well, with the ambiguity of the series arc more or less preserved. The book does close off a couple of theories: Audrey is not still in a coma from the bank explosion (a theory Fenn rejected as well), and the book strongly implies that Charlie is, at least in one form, a seemingly mortal human being (her relationship with her accountant/husband sure sounds like Charlie, although he is never named, leaving some ambiguity). But the fact that Audrey disappears could mean that she is almost anywhere by the events of S3. It’s even possible that Mr. C took Audrey to the convenience store after raping her, as with Diane, and the Audrey Tammy is writing about who had been out in the real world is a tulpa. Is this part of the “contract” Audrey and Charlie had? That her tulpa would be given domain over her “real world” existence while Audrey remained in the Lodge, or deep in a mental hospital, or both (one in spirit, one in body)? Is Charlie a Lodge spirit after all? (Charlie and Red remain, I think, the most prominent “mortal” TP characters whose surnames aren’t revealed. And Red is notably entirely absent from TFD, preserving his ambiguity.)
BTW, since a few people have been talking about this: I don’t see any reason to believe that Audrey knows Cooper raped her. She was in a coma! While people in comas can be aware of their surroundings, there’s no reason to suspect that was the case here. She’s a strong-minded woman who got pregnant and decided to raise the child herself rather than asking for help. And it’s possible that she reached out to JJW and was unhappy with his response.
Based on what we know, the only person who could/should have pieced it together is Will, and it puts his character in a pretty compromised light that he waited 25 years to come forward with what he knew. We already know from TMP that he suspected something dark was going on in the Palmer house and turned a blind eye. Now we have a second instance of Will (a mandated reporter) not reporting an instance of rape of a minor. It definitely puts one of the most seemingly decent characters from the original show in a darker light. Did he tell Harry about Cooper leaving Audrey’s room? Did Harry tell anyone else? Did Will/Harry just figure it didn’t matter since Cooper was off the grid anyway? Mrrrh. Sorry, I’m off-topic.
Considering that Harry was one of the two leads of the original show, I wish we’d gotten a little more on him than one and a half pages of material we probably could have guessed at anyway (he kept searching for Dale, he has cancer). It was nice to learn that the plan is for Hawk to take over as sheriff, though.
The unsolved 1991 crime investigation mentioned in TSHoTP is never mentioned again. My theory is that Gordon was referring to Garland’s “murder” and this is just another instance of sketchy Frostian timekeeping.
Weird that all the stuff in the first book regarding parallels between the Lodge spirits and supposed alien sightings doesn’t pay off at all. TSH works fine on its own, but it felt like Mark was hiding the ball a bit due to not wanting to reveal anything about S3. It would have been nice to revisit the Nordics & greys &c. in light of what we learned about the Fireman, Judy & co.