_Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me_ is a film that always captures my attention. If I happen across it when flipping through channels, chances are that I'll get sucked in and end up watching it again.

My brother and I were very much into _Twin Peaks_ when it aired on TV. We had recently gotten a VCR, and so we would record each episode, while watching it carefully live, then rewind the tape and watch it again. We certainly read, if not actively participated in, the Usenet newsgroup devoted to the show—alt.tv.twin-peaks.

_Fire Walk With Me_, coming out in 1992, was amazingly powerful, especially in a theater. It focused on the things I'd always been most interested in—the Black Lodge, BOB, The Man From Another Place_, and, of course, _why_ Laura Palmer was killed, and how she ended up there. Don't get me wrong, I love Dale Cooper (and, actually, Kyle MacLaughlin), but the showrunners really lost their way in the second season of _Twin Peaks_ when they stepped back from the mystical stuff and decided to torture us with storylines focused on the most annoying characters (Andy and Lucy), even going so far as to introduce new ones who were even worse (Dick). Not coincidentally, both Frost and Lynch were off working on other projects at that point. Things didn't get better until Lynch came back, took a look at what was happening, and yanked things back on track, leaving us with a chilling ending for the series. (Pretty much the opposite of what happened with _Millennium_, which died after show creator Chris Carter noticed how awesome it was and came back and wrecked it.)

McHugh sees _Fire Walk With Me_ as Lynch's rescue and rehabilitation of the core of _Twin Peaks_, the show: the true horror underlying everything happening in the town, especially the ways in which sexual abuse pushed Laura Palmer into prostitution and drug use to try to avoid the awful truth about BOB's identity, the investigation of Theresa Banks's murder, and what happened to Ronette Pulaski, all of which would have been awful without the supernatural aspects of their deaths/injuries.

Along with her personal interpretation of the film's action, McHugh's gives us a bunch of background information about both Lynch's career and reoccurring themes in his work and his choices in making the film, taken from various interviews, articles, books, and other sources.

Unfortunately, the ebook is not especially well edited—it almost seems like it was created from a first draft of the manuscript, and never updated. I also had some issues with it on my Kobo—there were a bunch of "broken image" icons scattered through the text, which turn out to be stills from the film. (I was able to fix things up with Calibre's built-in eBook editor application, but still.)

I learned some things I hadn't known (about both Lynch and the film), and I'm thinking about watching the film again to catch some of the subtle things I've somehow missed on previous viewings. I also have pointers to various other sources of information should I decide to follow up on anything McHugh talked about. But the editing and technical issues made the book more of a chore to read than it should have been, so I've knocked off one star. ( )