Books to Read While You’re Waiting for Twin Peaks’ Return

The Secret Place, by Tana French
In French’s latest, a police detective trespasses on the mystical terrain of female best friendship while investigating the murder of a young boarding-school boy, found dead on the grounds of an adjacent all-girls academy. The girls at the center of the story have as many secrets as Laura Palmer, and their nascent sexuality and secretive world confound a detective who knows there’s more to their stories than meets the eye.

Magic for Beginners, by Kelly Link
Link shares Lynch’s skill of spiking the mundane with a shot of weirdness, knowing that a world just a half-step out of sync with our own can be more arresting than a wholly invented place. In her second collection (watch for the fourth, Get in Trouble, next February), Link imagines alien territories inside of handbags, a new home where items become haunted one by one, and a mysterious, impossible TV show that reaches out to its biggest fan. (And if you want to really freak yourself out, go out of your way to read “The Specialist’s Hat,” the standout tale in her debut collection Stranger Things Happen. It’s got an ending that will coil up in your lizard brain and creep you out for weeks.)

The Thin Place, by Kathryn Davis
Davis’s “thin place” is a seaside town where magic can happen, for good or for ill. In the opening pages of this surreal, beguiling novel, a trio of little girls finds a dead man on a beach. One of them intervenes—and he’s alive again. From there the story unspools, about everyday life in a town where oddities breed oddities. Davis’s prose will put you into a trance, and her ending will delicately devastate you.

A Wild Sheep Chase, by Haruki Murakami
No matter what manner of weirdness Kyle MacLachlan’s indomitable Cooper encounters, he accepts the terms of the messed-up world he’s in. He has this in common with the nameless hero of A Wild Sheep Chase, a man whose encounter with a high-class thug who demands he track down a very specific sheep explodes his low-key existence, sending him down a wormhole into a world of shell-shocked sheep men, disappearing women, and ghostly visitors. And food, beer, movies, and jazz, of course. This is Murakami.