Talking to Mark Frost is like talking to a wise leprechaun that took you a really long time to track down and capture. Having worked alongside David Lynch as a writer and co-creator of one of the most widely pondered and tantalizingly confusing TV shows, Twin Peaks, he holds in his brain the answers to everything you’ve ever wanted to know about the fictional town and the characters who live there, and a great deal of them will stay in his brain.

Today, October 18, sees the release of Frost’s companion book to the series, The Secret History of Twin Peaks, and although the new episodes, set to air in 2017, were written well before he began this book, it’s intended to provide people with a fuller understanding of the show, its characters, and its mythology as a whole leading up to the brand new season. A hefty dossier compiled by a character within, referred to as “The Archivist,” the history book of this very famous fictional town is filled with secrets. With a nondisclosure agreement for reviewers, it sets the reader up for a deeper dip into “the soup,” as Frost calls it, of a place where nothing is quite as it seems. The starting point for the sometimes insane-seeming town’s folklore goes back to the days of Lewis and Clark, and the narrative carries you along through the ancestry of its main residents, picking up clues and building a storyline that better explains why things are the way they are in that neck of the woods.

Speaking with GQ, Frost told us about his new book, the enduring qualities of Twin Peaks, and why it shouldn’t be binge-watched—and gave coy hints about the new season.

GQ: Just in organizing all of the details regarding the characters and everything that happens in Twin Peaks, how did you get everything together while writing the book?

Mark Frost: I guess we can put a few spoilers in, but I don’t want to give too much away. Given that the book takes place largely in the universe of the first series, it was fairly easy to keep them organized and straight. In preparation, I went back and revisited the first series more extensively than I had even before the series itself.

In the book, one of the main mysteries as you’re making your way through it is figuring out who the character referred to as “The Archivist” is. This character is responsible for collecting all of the written materials that piece together the history of Twin Peaks into a dossier that is essentially this book, and thinking about that, that Archivist is kind of you.

It was a challenge. I mean, the book is very far-reaching, and its goal is to deepen and widen the mythology of the world of Twin Peaks, so there was a lot of independent research I had to do. A lot of collating of fact and fiction. And to create the narrative thread that carries you through the book was a pretty mighty balancing act. I felt like one of those guys from Vaudeville balancing plates on twelve sticks.

How did you come up with the decision to begin the town’s history with the story of Lewis and Clark? Because going back as far as you did, you could have started this biblically. You could have taken it all the way back.

Because the book takes the form of an epistolary novel, it depends on documents for the storytelling. That’s the engine that drives it. I couldn’t really begin before the written word that entered that area, in history. That felt like the right moment. It’s also about a clash of cultures. There’s obviously an indigenous culture there that is encountered by Lewis and Clark, and that kind of sets the events in motion.