Mark Allan Gunnells Novel 'Triangle' Offers Beautifully Tragic Story

It’s no secret adolescence can be rough. Those teenage years, so rife with hormones, emotional upheaval, bad decisions, and the search for personal identity, are the trying times when each of us truly begin our journey towards adulthood. Throughout the ages many have grappled with the unequaled headiness of adolescence; Freud imagined our teen tribulations as expressions of inner psychosexual turmoil, while Aristotle concluded that ‘the young are heated by Nature as drunken men by wine.” Yet it’s the undoubtedly the artist who best exposes those days in all their reckless, contradictory glory through poetry, literature, song, and film, from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to James Dean’s classic Rebel Without A Cause and everything in between.

Better known for works of horror such as 324 Abercorn, 2B, Haunted Places and Other Stories, Lucid, and the forthcoming Imposter Syndrome, Greenville, South Carolina-based queer author Mark Allan Gunnells shifts genre gears to explore the no-man's-land of adolescence in his most recent novel, Unnerving's Triangle, a book by turns sexy, funny, insightful, and heartbreaking.

During the lazy days of summer, openly gay teen Nate Howell meets and loses his virginity to Dean Nichols, the charming and handsome bisexual son of his new neighbor. With his writer father away on a book tour and his sister Sally yet to return from her freshman year of college, Nate has the family house to himself, and for the first week indulges a steamy affair with Dean. When Nate presses for more beyond physical coupling, however, he’s unexpectedly stonewalled; having moved to town with his dad to start anew following his parents bitter divorce and to reestablish himself after a stint in rehab to stem his alcoholism, a commitment-shy Dean insists he only forms emotional attachments with women, not men, and that any relationship fantasies Nate may be fostering are for naught. Burning with infatuation and unsatisfied with his friends-with-benefits status, however, Nate becomes determined to turn Dean into an actual boyfriend. His initial attempts at romance are awkward, but appear to be working until Sally comes home and throws a hitch into Nate’s plans by her obvious interest in Dean. With her well-earned reputation as the town slut ever-present in Nate’s mind, he worries that his sister will steal Dean away, an anxiety compounded by Dean’s reciprocal attraction to Sally. The situation takes a dangerous turn, however, once Dean learns of Nate’s own dark past; diagnosed at a young age with Intermittent Explosive Disorder, Nate frequently turns to violence and self-harm under stress. Off his meds and angry at his sister, Nate begins a cloak-and-dagger campaign to eliminate Sally from their unconventional love triangle, conning her abusive ex Benny into re-entering her life with disastrous consequences for everyone involved.

Though on its surface Triangle may seem to be easily quantifiable—two guys, a girl, and their personal and sexual entanglements with one another—as with all of Gunnells’ work there’s much more going on beneath the surface than initially appears. Ostensibly subtitled as ‘An Erotic Novel’, any sexual escapades takes a back seat to what is, essentially, a character study. Putting the literary microscope on his tiny cast (there are only five core characters overall), the author revels in displaying their foibles and triumphs, and their best efforts—or unwillingness—to grow as people. In many ways Triangle exists as a nice companion piece to Gunnells’ 2022 coming-of-age novel The Advantaged, which similarly explores many of the same themes about change, responsibility, and the equality existent in human imperfection. Talks abound in Triangle about identity and what makes us who we are: Is it our circumstances, our memories, or something innate in ourselves that can’t be touched by outside forces? As Nate notes at one point, “Every day is a new opportunity to recreate ourselves into the people we want to be,” and we see that assertion on display in each character: with Dean and Nate’s constant struggle to overcome their own self-destructive impulses; in Sally’s deliberate attempt to leave the promiscuous ways of her high school life behind. Even Benny, who in a lesser writer’s hands would be reduced to a trailer-trash thug cliché, is revealed to be more multi-dimensional than one would ordinarily assume.

Despite these profound notions, Gunnells never preaches to the audience; this isn’t some cheesy After School Special, after all. Along with the author’s masterfully intense prose, there’s a steady supply of fun, sly humor (Example: a bookstore’s grab-bag description of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code: ‘Puzzles reveal that the guy everyone thought was a virgin turned out to be a harlot’s Baby-Daddy.’), copious geek-tastic pop cultural references to comics, books, music, and movies, and, most importantly for an erotic novel, hot, steamy sex, both gay and straight. But Gunnells never loses sight of what’s ultimately at stake, and with its deeply drawn, complex characters, heart-wrenching resolution and moving epilogue, Triangle transcends any and all expectations to deliver a startling novel of uncompromising, unique poignancy that earns the full 5 (Out of 5) on my Fang Scale. ‘We all make our choices, and we live or die by them,’ Gunnells notes near the end. Truer words were never written.