Parallel Lines, by Mark McElroy

[Ulysses]

Parallel Lines
By Mark McElroy
Published by the author, 2023
Five stars

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.