Steve Parks, who has been practicing journalism for six decades, (including the Spy) has published a capstone project of sorts: his first novel. It’s called “Butterflies of the Cosmic Chaos” and subtitled “A Love & Loss Fantasy in Parallel Space-Time.” If the title puts you off or makes you think this book is over your head, fear not. Parks, who covered everything from politics to sports to Broadway shows as a reporter, editor and critic for the Baltimore Sun and Newsday, still is a journalist at heart.
His writing is earthy and approachable. The novel spends at least as much time on “love & loss” as it does in “parallel space-time.” It is a rollicking, Rolling Stones-infused tale — Stones fans shouldn’t miss it — that takes place in a golden age of newspapering, chronicles a reporter’s troubled love life, and turns into a murder mystery.
The story ends with a baffling journey through the “Megaverse,” where events like the Kennedy assassination and the 9/11 attacks may take different shapes depending on where you are in space-time and what choices you make.
Like the author, the protagonist, Scott Crockett, is a farm boy on Maryland’s Eastern Shore who learns newspapering at the state university. He also learns, the hard way, about romance just in time for the sexual revolution of the 1970s.
“Sex is not inevitable in life. But it is vital,” Crockett tells us. “That’s why sex plays a central role in this fable about past and present, and whether anything in life or history is really over and done.”
Crockett is a seeker, never satisfied with pat answers. If this novel were a film, it would be a director’s cut. Steve Parks chronicles the good, the bad, and the ugly of Scott Crockett’s journey, with no holds barred and nothing left unsaid.
“Butterflies” is a wild ride and one I think you’ll enjoy.
Jim Bock is a former Baltimore Sun foreign bureau correspondent and an editor at U.S. News & World Report.
