Genre: Sci-Fi, Romance, Comedy, Time Travel
LGBTQ+ Category: Bi, Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses, Paranormal Romance Guild
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About The Book
When Thomas’s constant indiscretions wreck his decade-long marriage to handsome Carter Lamm, he wonders how different choices might have made him happier.
In a misguided attempt to help, Ed Williams, Thomas’s Big Gay Role Model, shares a technology that plunges users into alternative worlds: versions of the present day, shaped by different choices. Would Thomas be happier stepping on Legos while juggling a wife and kid … partnered to America’s favorite secretly gay action star … or married to “The One Who Got Away”?
With each jump from life to life, Thomas gets just 24 hours to choose to stay (and, likely screw things up with his signature blend of self-absorption and over-thinking) or move on to the next of four “roads not taken.” But with each jump poking holes in the fabric of reality — and with the creator of the jump tech rushing to shut this unauthorized adventure down — can Thomas break his self-sabotage habit, escape collapsing realities, and find the critical path to happiness before his blundering around destroys the universe?
This gay romantic comedy with sci-fi / parallel universe elements will delight anyone who has looked back on prior relationships and wondered … “What if?” Parallel Lines combines the comically self-aware sexuality of Brontez Purnell’s 100 Boyfriends … the escalating tensions of Kate Hope Day’s alternate worlds drama If, Then … and the life-hopping drama of Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library. The result is a funny, fast-paced, and unexpectedly spiritual tale of one man’s efforts to put his love life back together even as the world comes apart at the seams.
The Review
Set in a not-too-distant future, Mark McElroy’s “Parallel Lines” held a deeply emotional resonance for me. It is a savvy, thoughtful mashup of science fiction, existentialist angst, and time-loop adventure.
Thomas and Carter are on their way to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Warren and Ed, an older gay couple, at their lake house outside of Atlanta. Thomas’s own ten-year- relationship with Carter is crashing and burning, adding some bitter irony to the situation.
At the end of the evening, Ed, a NASA scientist-turned-Methodist minister, confides a deep secret to Thomas, sharing with him a device that takes him on an adventure that will change—or possibly destroy—his life.
What begins—in the reader’s mind—as a quest to salvage his broken relationship, becomes something quite different. Thomas confronts the consequences of past choices in his life, and begins to see that the damage he inflicted on people who loved him might have been his own determination to prove himself unworthy of love.
The story could have been a straightforward existentialist journey through guilt and responsibility, but quickly takes on a sci-fi tension involving the sort of time-line disruption issues associated with time travel. Thomas isn’t allowed to make his journey of self-discovery in peace, and the adventure that began as a quest for his soul turns into a race against time for his very existence.
McElroy has created a lot of interesting characters, including some we don’t see very much. But the key players in Thomas’s odyssey are important, and the reader comes to understand who all these actors in Thomas’s drama are. Thomas is not a wonderful person misunderstood by the people around him. He is a flawed human who has let his own self-doubts sabotage his life and damage the lives of people he cares about. In the end, without giving anything away, the story becomes a race against time as Thomas not only has to find his way home, but also has to figure out exactly what it is he wants.
The ending is not what one might expect. Not all wounds can be healed. You can’t always get what you want—but you still have to figure out what that is before you can try. I found myself emotionally knocked about a bit, but ended up impressed with McElroy’s skill at managing a complicated scenario that left me thinking and feeling more than I expected to.
Five stars.
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.
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