Tuesday, July 31, 2007

The autobiography of Dale Cooper


As I mentioned almost a month back, I was going to read another Twin Peaks tie-in novel (well, not exactly a novel), The Autobiography of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes, originally published in 1991. I read it and was glad I did, since it did fill in some questions the original TV series left - even though it also made me want to know more (which means I'm a fan, and I am, even though now that I checked the Wikipedia entry for the series, I learned more than I already knew in just a couple of minutes).
As with Laura Palmer's diary, you get nothing out of this if you haven't seen the series and during the first fifty or so pages you begin to wonder why you're reading this, but then again you have to have some pre-reading information always when you start reading a biography or an autobiography. The book gets more fascinating when Windom Earle makes his first appearance and there are some truly chilling moments regarding the mysterious kidnapping of Earle's wife and her killing. It seems also evident that David Lynch picked something up from this book, since the rip-off movie, Fire Walk With Me, uses some scenes from the book, such as FBI agents disappearing mysteriously. (I was also wondering whether Winston Groom used bits from this book in his Forrest Gump, especially how Dale Cooper moves through the American post-WWII history, but I didn't know at the time (I do now, since I checked) that Groom wrote his novel five years before the Dale Cooper book.)
The writer, Scott Frost, is the Twin Peaks creator Mark Frost's brother and wrote some of the episodes of the series. He seems to have written two thrillers in recent years.
(Okay, this will have to do for my blogging for several days. You have just evidenced me in my maniac mood.)

2 comments:

Andy said...

Juri,
I'm going through Twin Peaks for a second time and read the book before watching and plan on reading it afterwards as well. I agree it starts mundane and ramps of with Windham. Tell me, did you get the sense that something sinister has been after Cooper long before his arrival to Twin Peaks after reading the book as I did?

Juri said...

Yes, but it wasn't very clear what it was, and I don't have the book at hand to check. There weren't many moments with that sinister force, though. But I think you're right. The same thing happens, more openly of course, with the Laura Palmer book, but there are same elements working in this book as well.