Tuesday, August 25, 2026

The Darko Night Rises


You kind of have to hand it to Richard Kelly -- the writer-director of Donnie Darko, Southland Tales, and The Box never does anything halfway, which... has basically crippled his movie career for decades. The Box came out in 2009 and he's been promising new work for every single one of the seventeen years since then, usually as some off-shoot of one of those earlier projects because the man is an obsessive one. I find that admirable, even if frustrating -- probably because I find it deeply relatable. Anyway either way the promises he's been making have finally come to something -- an 800+ page "sequel" novel to Donnie Darko called The Philosphy of Time Travel that you can actually pre-order right this very minute. It has a release date of December 15th though so, given our history, I'm waiting until the thing is in my cold dead hands before I really believe it's true. Here is a description of the book (and yes the influence of Mark Frost's Twin Peaks "dossiers" is obvious to me too):

"On October 4, 1988, a derelict jet engine falls from the sky over Los Cerritos, California, and crashes through the bedroom of sixteen-year-old Donnie Darko, killing him instantly. For his family, the tragedy should end there. It doesn't. Assembled entirely from recovered government transcripts, secretly recorded conversations, and early email correspondence, The Philosophy of Time Travel reconstructs the eighteen months that follow through the eyes of Donnie's mother, Rose Darko, as she and her husband Eddie, a senior CIA analyst, are drawn into a widening investigation that reaches from the Oval Office to the Mojave Desert. FBI surveillance teams, FAA officials, USC professors, and a mysterious circle of trackers and financiers all converge on the same impossible discovery: a strange "celestial fluid," a set of unexplained artifacts, and a forbidden book, Roberta Sparrow's own Philosophy of Time Travel, that appears to predict the exact circumstances of its own recovery."

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