The tie-in is a curious beast. As an exercise in branding, it can encompass lunch boxes, duvet covers, video games, toy mannequins and lollipops. In literature, a true tie-in refers to televisual or cinematic attempts to extend the narrative of a novel without changing its original story. It involves more than simply changing the book jacket – in the way that the novels of Jane Eyre and Jaws were reissued with new covers to cash in on their cinematic fame. And it is quite different from novelising a film – though that can lead to some interesting comparisons with its representations on screen.

As we are now a third of the way through Twin Peaks: The Return on TV, it seems like a good time to go back to the surprisingly large quantity of prose that ties into that series and its mythology. In 1990, at the end of the first season, I was still a student; all of the mysteries remained unsolved and the principal character, FBI special agent Dale Cooper, had just been shot down by a masked gunman. Then came the spin-off novel The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, written by Twin Peaks director David Lynch’s daughter, Jennifer. How we pored over the book for clues. There were moments that seemed off but not in a Lynchian way – discrepancies, a failure to catch the voice. Later it would be contradicted by the second series and the 1992 prequel movie, Fire Walk With Me. But, as always with Lynch, it seemed the anomalies might also hold answers. I reread the book until the spine broke.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Life after death … Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer in Fire Walk With Me. Photograph: Alamy

In 1991, Scott Frost, the brother of Lynch’s co-writer Mark Frost, added pieces to the jigsaw puzzle with The Autobiography of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper: My Life, My Tapes. Finishing at the beginning of the TV series, it sows the seeds of future narratives, such as the story of Cooper’s affair, but it’s more like an extended teaser trailer. We can’t find out if Cooper is alive or dead; we can’t know the mythology of the Lodges; we can’t know who the murderer is. As such it conforms to the tie-in form. These kinds of books are like planes trapped in a holding pattern, circling around the story but unable to land: nothing can be truly revealed and nothing can entirely contradict the story. Many of these tape transcripts are dictated to the enigmatic Diane, Cooper’s secretary, whom he describes as “an interesting cross between a saint and a cabaret singer”. But who is she? Her first appearance in the 2017 revival of Twin Peaks, played by Laura Dern wearing a platinum blond wig, makes the tease over her identity all the more delightful and infuriating.

Twin Peaks: An Access Guide to the Town, also published in 1991, plays up the quirky while downplaying the horrific experiences of the teenagers. The genius of the series was always that, as Bakhtin observed about Dostoyevsky, the silly and the sadistic, the cheap and the challenging were side by side, as they were in the newspapers of the day. It’s nevertheless a sweet enough book, and I’d squeal if we got a TV nod to some of its characters.

The Secret History of Twin Peaks is a different creature entirely. Published last year by Mark Frost, it purports to be a collection of found and annotated documents that “TP”, an FBI agent, has been asked to decipher. They suggest that someone in the town has been assembling a history of its weirdness. It offers both a crash course in the backstory of the town and its characters while also gently dropping hints (There is someone called Robert … the first killer Bob?). It is an elegant work of prose, which doubles as a piece of publicity. Twin Peaks has an enviable history in this regard. The stories seduce precisely because they reveal nothing. When the book scheduled for the end of the new series comes out, the one thing I want from both the television version and the tie-in is no answers.

• Twin Peaks is on Sky Atlantic.