Richard Kelly’s Donnie Darko Sequel Novel The Philosophy of Time Travel Arriving This Fall

We were very excited, and frankly relieved, to learn Richard Kelly finally had a new project coming this year, and equally surprised that it’s a novel—a “gigantic” one, in his own words. Today finally brings fuller news, and with it a fulfillment of his long-promised Donnie Darko sequel. Sort of. Entitled The Philosophy of Time Travel, it’s an 800-something-page doorstop that he’s been writing for more than ten years and conceptualizing for closer to 20., it’s an epistolary novel “written by” Donnie’s mother and father as they’re “vigorously documenting what is happening to them and why their son has died and their paranoia and their separate detective missions about how to figure out what happened and why it happened.” It’s available for pre-order ahead of a fall release that coincides with the film’s 25th anniversary.

Kelly has long spoken of ambitions to make a feature-film sequel to Donnie Darko, which The Philosophy of Time Travel seemingly buttresses. The novel emerged as the preempting of a live-action film that was growing to untenable size, and would serve as the basis for “an animated/motion-capture movie and then continue to the story with a live-action project that jumps 28 years into the future” and comprise “much more narrative material.” (For those keeping track, yes, 28 years after 1988 is 2016—yet another election year for a Richard Kelly movie.) These 800-something pages will serve as a pitch to the original film’s cast, but is its own satisfaction for fans of Donnie Darko, and especially Kelly, whose return doesn’t arrive a moment too soon.

Read Kelly’s long statement on the book and an official synopsis below, along with the cover:

** “I think there’s a lot of surprises when you realize who the characters really are in the reality of Southern California, how they were drawn into this collective dream. They were drawn into this thing called the tangent universe, this lunar month, this dream that lasted for 28 days that they collectively all experienced together, and they’re sort of all trying to piece it together. And they form this sort of support group that turns into a cult, in a way, and they all come together. There’s a lot of surprises about who they are, and I think for me it was really gratifying to see all the characters start to interact with each other in response to Donnie’s death, and they all become really close friends. And there are characters who are villainous in the movie who you realize in real life they’re not villainous at all; they might have done horrible things in the dream of the first movie, but when you meet them in the reality of the sequel, they’re trying to process why they did horrible things in this dream, and they’re coming to terms with it and they’re analyzing it just like the fans are analyzing the movie. So I just I wanted to write a really gratifying part for all the actors. And that goes down the line even to some of the actors who only appear in one or two scenes. You’ll see that they have really fleshed out narrative arcs and everything.”

The official sequel to the cult classic film DONNIE DARKO – the question fans have asked for over twenty years, finally answered.**

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.

Set against a real backdrop of the late Reagan era, the novel expands the mythology of the original film; Tangent Universes, Living Receivers, the Manipulated, into a sustained conspiracy that questions whether Donnie’s death was ever an accident at all, and whether “gone” is the same as “gone for good.”

Written by Richard Kelly, creator of the film DONNIE DARKO, this is the authorized continuation of the story for longtime fans and new readers alike.