From the eerie “Hell Is Real” billboard to the world-historic Trinity Test, Jeff Wood gives us a brilliant minute-by-minute reading of one of television's most radical episodes. Unpacking the mysteries of Twin Peaks: The Return, Part 8 with poetic insight and intellectual rigor, Wood blends cultural analysis, film history, and philosophical reflection, providing essential reading for cinephiles, scholars, and Lynch fans alike-a visionary guide to a landmark in modern storytelling.

Trevor Paglen, Artist, MacArthur Fellow, USA

The silver screen and the black screen of the TV are the Heaven slash Hell that plague us with a pandemonium of meaning (in this respect Heaven is just Hell for nice people). When a hero or villain emerges from the atomic explosion of the screens, Hell is unleashed. As a superfan who has watched countless, countless times, I'm here to tell all that Wood's book astoundingly captures every mesmerizing step in this pull-out-all-the-stops episode of the pivotal work, Twin Peaks: the one Slavoj Zižek never writes about. Wood is a guide to Hell, just as Lynch's episode is (a guide to) Hell. We need a guide: we live here.

Timothy Morton, Author of Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013) and Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology (2024), USA

Writing at the threshold of the post-Lynch era, Jeff Wood employs a wild array of approaches-wrangled, crucially, by the minute-by-minute framework. Here, he submits this incisive reading of “Part 8” and the larger meaning of Twin Peaks and Lynch's oeuvre-a body of work doubling as America's toxicology report. That this report takes us from the Great Serpent Mound of Ohio to Nine Inch Nails to Trinity and a “frog-moth” is fittingly Lynchian and a testament to Wood's ambition and skill.

Grace Krilanovich, Author of The Orange Eats Creeps (2010), USA