The Secret History of Twin Peaks (2016) by Mark Frost: Mark Frost's canonical (as in, 'It's a part of the series lore') book is creepy, informative fun. It could almost stand on its own, though in that case it doesn't exactly have a conclusion.
In a nod to the documentary strain of horror fiction, The Secret History of Twin Peaks deploys journal entries, diary excerpts, newspaper articles, and first-person testimonials and reporting to supply David Lynch and Mark Frost's fictional town with a convincingly weird history as a place where the walls between the normal world and the world of demons and aliens have worn very, very thin.
The conceit here is that much of what we're reading was found in a lockbox at an undisclosed location. It's been assigned by FBI assistant director Gordon Cole (played by Lynch on the TV series) to a younger agent with the initials 'T.P.' to annotate. T.P.'s notes appear in the margins.
The contents of the lockbox (or 'dossier') were assembled by an initially unnamed character from Twin Peaks (the show and the town). That unnamed character (dubbed 'the Archivist' by T.P.) also comments on the various pieces assembled in the dossier while hinting and then confirming that much of the dossier was assembled by another character from Twin Peaks. Got all that?
Frost brings real historical figures (Lewis of Lewis and Clark; UFO investigators J. Allen Hynek and Kenneth Arnold; President Nixon; Jackie Gleason (!)...) and real events into the secret history of demon- and angel-haunted Twin Peaks, to enjoyably creepy and expansive effect. It seems as if Frost is much more into UFO' s than Lynch, making The Secret History of Twin Peaks a somewhat different experience than the show. And that's a good thing. Everything herein dovetails nicely with what we've seen on Twin Peaks without over-writing anything.
Frost supplies background for many of the characters of Twin Peaks, from the Mayor and his brother (remember them? Well, they're major players here!) to Major Briggs and Dr. Jacoby. The dossier ends when the Archivist apparently disappears in 1989, a few days after the events in the series end. We do discover the fate of a couple of characters from the show. However, a gap of about 27 years is indeed left between the end of dossier and Twin Peaks: The Return. Some of that gap is filled in by T.P.'s marginal notes, as she or he is writing just days before the events chronicled in Twin Peaks: The Return begin.
In all, this is an impressive addition to the world of documentary-style horror and fantasy fiction. If you've watched Twin Peaks: The Return, you'll probably guess the identities of our archivist and the young FBI agent reading his work in 2016. You may be surprised when the UFO stuff starts flying, or when American magazine editor Raymond Palmer's The Shaver Mysteries suddenly makes an appearance. L. Ron Hubbard shows up as well. And Aleister Crowley, and so on, and so forth. Highly recommended.
The Damned Highway: Fear and Loathing in Arkham by Brian Keene and Nick Mamatas (2011): It's been a hell of a year for H.P. Lovecraft and his Cthulhu Mythos with a Cthulhu three-part South Park arc, an appearance on Supernatural, Alan Moore's Neonomicon miniseries, and what now seems to be a self-sustaining Cthulhu-based publishing industry. Oh, and there's going to be a Cthulhu Mythos app for your iPhone. Ai! Lovecraft, thou shouldst be living at this hour.
OK, you'd be 121 now, but that's young for some of HPL's less human protagonists.
So I guess it was only a matter of time until someone collided the worlds of eccentric outcast Lovecraft and eccentric outcast Hunter S. Thompson, as Keene and Mamatas do here with a "previously unpublished" section from Thompson's coverage of the 1972 American presidential campaign, Fear and Loathing: The Campaign Trail '72.
Having discovered that ancient deity/alien Cthulhu backs Nixon for president in 1972, Thompson heads out from his Colorado cabin to cover the story. Or stop Nixon. Whichever comes first. Keene and Mamatas do a lovely job replicating Thompson's gonzo journalism and gonzo prose style while also working in enough references and allusions to the Cthulhu Mythos and its foundational stories and incidents that an annotated edition might actually prove helpful to the uninitiated.
Thompson's tolerance for drugs and alcohol serve him well as he tracks Cthulhu's influence across America, with stops in demon-haunted Arkham, decayed fishing-town Innsmouth, and squamous, leprous Washington, DC. The Republican Party serves Cthulhu. Whom do the Democrats serve? And can the world be saved? Does it deserve to be?
And what happened to the American Dream, depicted here as being as damned and monstrous and horribly malformed and mutated as any Lovecraft protagonist damned by fate or heredity or an accidental brush with the world-devouring Great Old Ones.
Keene and Mamatas weave together fact and fiction in rewarding, hilarious and surprisingly moving ways as they take their narrator straight into the heart of Hell...or at least some version of Hell. Events major (from J. Edgar Hoover's death to 9/11) and minor (Democratic hopeful Edmund Muskie's bizarre mispronunciation of 'Canuck' as 'Cannock' spins off into an entire sub-plot) butt up against Thompson's idiosyncratic personality and style, as well as Lovecraft's equally idiosyncratic personality and style. "We are all Cthulhu," Nixon tells Thompson at one point. Well, I hope not. I really hope not. Highly recommended.
