DISCLAIMER: This modified novelization of the movie Donnie Darko is not authorized by or written in affiliation with anyone officially involved with the film. Or even the movie industry. Also, nobody is getting paid for this sucker. I do it all for you, my... uh... Richard Kelly's loving fans. I banged this out in about two days on June 22 '05, alone in my basement. Staying up 'til 6:00 in the morning. Not eating, or drinking the required amount of liquids to sustain the human body.

AUTHOR'S NOTE: The novelization draws from four sources: a) the production script (or, the Director's Cut), b) the shooting script (the original film), and c) my own interpretation. And of course, d) what I remembered from the movie. I took a transcript of the original Donnie Darko and pieced it together with bits from the production script that I felt were most appropriate to the medium. There are 25 chapters at almost 60 pages, 12 font, single-spaced. More like a novella, actually...

Finally, I made up some scenes and dialogue to make the story seem more like a novel than a novelization. Yes, I am a heretic.

Somewhere in the clouds there hangs a darkness
Somewhere in this town there lies a shadow
Both are bound in water, sealed in metal
And the sky will split within the mind of Donnie Darko...

-The Day After, revisited

October 1, 1988

11:00 AM Carpathian Ridge

...cleaving through the sky, sunrise giving way to white clouds in a blue sea, morphing rapidly into darkness peppered with fractional points of light; the moon waxing and waning, quicker and quicker until it catches fire, and the dead came out to play with the living under a crescent sun in the night...

Still. Cold.

Gooseflesh rubbed against asphalt, stones catching on T-shirt cloth. The air tasted like morning light, pale and sharp. He saw the faint outline of trees through his eyelids. Stirred at the persuasive rustle of leaves in the wind, the birds awake long before. The surface he was lying on felt curved, like a bowl. He imagined he was the last morsel of food at the bottom of the bowl, waiting to be plucked up by a hungry monster from the sky...

A sharp pebble gently poked his cheek. He stirred, opening his eyes. Slowly uncurled himself, joints popping in the crisp air. The world as seen through the top of the bowl eventually straightened itself into a tree-lined horizon. Forested area surrounded the cul-de-sac he was lying in. From this viewpoint, he could look off the ridge into empty space, where rock canyon opened into the modest little town below.

His town.

He blinked sleepily at it from the ridge, dew in his hair. His side ached from the gritty surface of the road. He clambered stiffly onto his bike, which had been lying on its side beside him, and began pedalling.

The air snapped at his clothes as he flew back down the path. The October wind was temperamental, but still warm. He squeezed his frozen knuckles on the handlebars, the chill of the ground lying dormant in his bones. Wondered if it was possible that his marrow might turn to ice.

A red Trans Am flashed by him as he re-entered Middlesex, a world very different from the one seen from the Ridge. From above, Middlesex laid out in the fog was a ghost town, an Atlantis lost beneath the clouds. Once inside, he could feel himself sinking back into the folds of reality. Old women jogging in their faded piped sweat suits. Older men watering their lawns. The kids usually hung out at the malls, or the scrub area surrounding the town. Murdering beer bottles with BB guns. Most of them were probably still asleep.

He passed a sign advertising the Middlesex Halloween Haunt festival, complete with dripping letters and a garish picture of a Jack-O-Lantern. The graphic was terrible. Surely they could have hired somebody better. He thought about the sketches lying unseen in his bedroom drawers, stuffed haphazardly under boxer shorts and pairs of socks. The image flew out of his head as he reached home.

Nobody seemed to notice his return. His father Eddie was out on the front lawn, teasing big sister Elizabeth with a leaf blower. She shrieked, flailing as the gust of filtered air hit her face. Blonde hair whipping around her makeup-darkened eyes, model's nose. She stalked off in a huff, passing ten-year old Samantha, who was busy jumping on a trampoline. Sproing. Sproing.

He clumsily dismounted his bike and went inside, ignoring the query written on the magnetic fridge board:

WHERE'S DONNIE?

By the time dinner rolled around, the memo board had been long erased, and his absence went unmentioned. The Darko family sat at a table that rarely enjoyed full attendance. The atmosphere was stale and awkward as they ate leftovers, their mother Rose too tired too cook.

Samantha had peeled all the pepperoni off her pizza and was covertly handing them to Donnie to enjoy. He looked at the flaccid pieces of meat. They looked kind of like Seth Devlin's face. He ate them, making sure to chew long and slow.

Elizabeth tapped her glass for attention. "I'm voting for Dukakis," she announced smugly. Her father's pizza slice stopped inches from his face.

Stillness around the table.

"Well," Eddie said after some clearly bitter thinking, "Perhaps when you have children of your own that need braces, and you can't afford them because half of your husband's paycheck goes to the federal government, you'll regret that decision."

Elizabeth rolled her eyes incredulously. "My husband's paycheck?" Rose looked vaguely amused. "A woman of the eighties," she murmured. She looked tired, her dark hair fading a little. A glass of her usual dinner wine in one hand. Occasionally she glanced at Donnie, eyes haunted. Trying to see him.

Elizabeth continued. "Anyway, I'm not going to squeeze on out 'til I'm, like, thirty." The way she said it, thirty, it was clearly a dirty word. Donnie felt the sudden need to intervene.

"Will you still be working at the Yarn Barn?" he said to Elizabeth sarcastically, letting contempt filter through his voice. "'Cause I hear that's a great place to raise children."

Elizabeth glared at him. "Har, har"

Rose interjected. "No, I think a year of partying is enough. She'll be going to Harvard this fall-"

"I haven't been accepted yet, mother."

"Well, if you think Michael Dukakis will provide for this country prior to the point when you decide to 'squeeze one out', then I think you're misinformed." Rose sipped her wine.

"When can I squeeze one out?" Samantha asked in all innocence.

"Not until eighth grade."

Rose looked at him in disbelief. "Excuse me?"

"Donnie, you're such a dick!" Elizabeth exclaimed, having found an opening to pay him back for the Yarn Barn comment. Donnie rose to the challenge. "Whoa, that was a little hostile there," he said in mock alarm. "Maybe you should be the one in therapy. Then Mom and Dad can pay someone two hundred dollars an hour to listen to all of your thoughts, so we won't have to!"

Elizabeth countered fiercely. "Okay, you want to tell Mom and Dad why you stopped taking your medication?"

It was a low blow. The table stared at him. His fists clenched under the table. He could think of only one way to channel his frustration: "You are such a fuck-ass!"

Elizabeth burst into laughter. "What did you just call me!" Provoking him to say it again. He bit his tongue as Rose turned on him.

"When did you stop taking your medication?"

"Well you can go suck a fuck!"

"Elizabeth!"

Donnie leapt back into the fray. "Oh, tell me," he said in a sing-song voice. "How exactly does one suck a fuck!"

Eddie glanced from Samantha to the fight, pantomiming 'hear no evil'. Rose looked disgusted. "We will not have this at the dinner table!" she said firmly, picking up her glass. Donnie and Elizabeth fell into opposite corners of the ring, panting slightly, still prepared to leap at each other's throats. No one moved.

Silence reigned again until Samantha's concerned voice broke the spell. "What's a fuck-ass?"

Eddie snorted into his pizza.

That night Rose tried playing connect-the-dots with her children, but it was like they were each living in a separate universe. The trials of a mother. She dispatched her husband to lecture Samantha on the dangers of foul language, then cornered Elizabeth on the stairs. She was talking into her cell phone.

"Frank, I took a year off to be with you. No, don't get angry..." She sighed, hung up. Noticed her mother staring at her. "What?"

"How did you know?"

"I caught him flushing pills down the toilet. He knows you check the container."

"How long?"

Elizabeth shrugged. "I didn't realize it was such a big deal."

"Well, it is a big deal!"

Elizabeth said nothing. They stood facing each other. Stalemate. Elizabeth turned away.

"G'night."

Rose watched her disappear into her bedroom. Took a deep breath, climbed the stairs. This was the part she was dreading.

Her son lay in the depths of his room, surrounded by indecipherable cultural artifacts and rumpled posters. His bed light was on. He was reading a collection of Graham Greene stories, barely even looked up when she came in. The only sign he noticed her was a muttered "Get out of my room."

Rose held her ground. "Where do you go at night?" she said softly. "I wish I knew."

The longing in her voice made him want to throw something against the wall. When he didn't answer, she asked "Did you toilet paper the Johnson's house?"

He slapped down the book. "Is that what you came up here to ask me?"

"No."

"I stopped rolling houses in the sixth grade, Mom. Now get out."

Rose wouldn't relent. "You know, some days it might be nice to just look at you and see my son. I don't recognize this person today."

The truth wandered briefly through his head. Me neither, Mom. ...Mom, when I look in the mirror, I'm just as confused as you are. Instead, what came out of his mouth was: "Then why don't you start taking the goddamn pills?" Burying the things he wanted to say, like the sketches, under his mind. Rose stared at him. Moved off. Closed the door tenderly behind her.

She looked so sad. He couldn't resist.

"Bitch."

Rose stopped outside the door, but didn't look back. Defeated. In his dim room, Donnie's victory felt like poison.

Eddie Darko looked up from his novel at the sound of the bedroom door opening. Rose entered quietly, arms crossed in front of her. Protective. She came and stood over the bed. He put down his book.

She smiled, nursing her pain. "Our son just called me a bitch," she informed him.

Eddie grunted. "You're not a bitch."

She waited.

"You're bitching. But you're not a bitch."

Rose lay down beside him, pretended to sleep. All the while thinking of the person behind the door at the end of the hallway, wondering who he could be, what he was doing in this house.

Eddie felt her thoughts pressing on him, a killer in the night. Turned off the bedside lamp. Went downstairs in the dark. Sat in the La-Z-Boy, kept himself occupied with politics awash in the glow of the television screen. Dukakis was saying something about drug-running dictators in Panama. Son of a bitch. And there was Elizabeth, too. Her and her brother. Kids these days...

The first day of October was drawing to a close. In the bathroom, Donnie read the label on the bottle of prescription drugs. 'L. THURMAN M.D'. The name of his therapist. Thera-pissed. He retracted that; she wasn't so bad for a shrink.

He watched himself pop the pills in the mirror over the sink. Wondered if he looked like a drug addict. Maybe a little. Maybe it was his eyes. What would Rose say if he became a drug dealer? Probably nothing. Drug dealers made a lot of money. Seth Devlin claimed he did, anyway, and he was just a high-school pusher. If he had that much money, Donnie decided, he could move far enough away that he'd never have to hear his mother's voice again. He noticed that this thought did nothing to make him feel better.

Thoughts in freefall, Donnie went to bed. Thinking, Shit. Maybe I am crazy.

In the foyer, the clock struck midnight.