Another Dimension of Us by Mike Albo, Penguin Workshop, 2023, 317 pages, $18.99.

Author Mike Albo’s new novel, a gay, young adult fantasy called Another Dimension of Us, has action that ranges far and wide across the multiverse, but it opens in a very mundane time and place: Herron High School in 1986, where Tommy Gaye has just finished ninth grade.

Tommy is an instantly likable. An everyman of a main character, he’s got acne, he’s infinitely critical of himself, he’s sweet — and he’s hopelessly in love.

The object of his unrequited affection is an enigmatic, romantic figure from his class: a gorgeous, lanky boy named Renaldo (René) Calabasas. Tommy and Renaldo both work on Herron’s literary magazine and attend the poetry club overseen by their teacher Ms. Sally Ziller. But Renaldo’s behavior is oddly courtly and his interests range far further afield than high school poetry. Specifically, Renaldo is interested in alternate realms of reality and pours over a book called The Sacred Art of Astral Projection by Master Sebastian.

Renaldo might be just otherworldly enough to be oblivious to Tommy’s fairly-obvious infatuation, but they still spend lots of their free time together, riding their bikes to the town library in order to pursue Renaldo’s latest fixation, which is keraunoscopy, the study of lightning as an omen.

This turns out to be pointed — soon enough, Renaldo is struck by lightning and he ends up in a coma with his friends worriedly gathered at his bedside.

When he comes out of his coma, Renaldo seems like an entirely different person. He is still suave, but no longer strange – a player in the school’s social hierarchy, oddly quippy and callous. This new Renaldo, in other words, is Tommy’s worst nightmare: a cool kid.

Suddenly, our awkward young hero is riding his bike blindly, in a heartbroken rage, feeling betrayed. All the wisps of romance that had attended his prior friendship with René are now blasted away.

But what if Renaldo really is a different person? In quick order, Mr. Albo’s novel turns from a lopsided high school friendship to a dimension-hopping, time-traveling fantasy where Tommy not only gets a visitor named Pris from the year 2044 but also begins exploring those alternate realities hinted at in The Sacred Art of Astral Projection.

He is guided by a character named Oona Lustrada, who might have the answer to the change that’s come over Renaldo. As she tells Tommy, the answer might be found at a mystical destination called Akashic Records.

“It’s where every soul and act is recorded,” she tells him. “It’s like a huge, endless library.”

With the help of old friends and new (and Ms. Ziller, since even in a Young Adult fantasy, it’s helpful for somebody to have a driver’s license), Tommy must navigate a weird new landscape in order to restore his crush to normal — and maybe change the future.

Mr. Albo does all this with a charming kind of economical skill. Some readers might be a bit impatient with the feeling that he’s over-egged the pudding. After all, Tommy’s immensely-identifiable plight of pining over a seemingly-unobtainable boy at the height of the AIDS crisis (and with a surname like Gaye) could easily support a moving novel all by itself, without extensive detours into the spirit realm.

But those details are energetically done, and readers impatient with romance will have plenty to keep them entertained.

And the Hollywood casting for Renaldo will be irresistible.

Mike Albo will host a reading and book talk at Bunch of Grapes Bookstore on Monday, July 24 at 7 p.m.