About the Author

Ross McMeekin is the author of a noir, The Hummingbirds (Skyhorse Publishing, 2018.) His short fiction has appeared in literary journals and magazines such as Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, Redivider, and X-R-A-Y. He has won emerging writer fellowships from Hugo House and Jack Straw Cultural Center in Seattle. For the last ten years, he has served as editor of the literary journal, Spartan.

Reviews

“In Below The Falls, Ross McMeekin’s stories, taut and at times taciturn, but polished and finely wrought, explore many lives in many places with empathy, understanding, and hope. These short stories speak volumes beyond their brevity, as art does, and stay with the reader long after the pages are turned.”

—Edward J Delaney, author of The Acrobat and The Big Impossible

"Read this book through impolite eyeballs, empty eye sockets, and eyes magnified to the size of plum pits. In his debut collection, Ross McMeekin creates a black and white world that’s anything but absolutes. Instead, it’s full of memorable imagery of eggs scattered with pepper and snow with birds, all accented with a slash of red woven throughout – warm blood, cedar bones, and pizza slices. In twenty-five stunning stories, he ties characters down with zip-ties in lawn chairs to set up group photo stories, illuminates lives with headlamps, flashlights, glitter, searchlights and skillful wordsmanship. Each story takes a reader’s breath away, but McMeekin gives it back with lungs that curl like pillbugs, oxygen tanks, morning winds, air rafts, and a Bird of Paradise worthy of Poe. There are lessons here in loss, grief, and family as McMeekin sends his characters and readers on a search for nicer homes for their hearts."

—Amy Barnes, author of Child Craft and Ambrotypes

“In an early story in Ross McMeekin’s new story collection, Below the Falls, a character says, “I’ve made a nicer home for my heart,” and I can’t think of a better way to frame the reading experience. McMeekin writes with a steady and assured hand, with a patience for allowing scenes to develop naturally, for creating bright and dark settings teeming with life and menace. You’ll find yourself nestling into a comfortable chair and losing hours to the dramas of the heart and nature, and you’ll stand up a little creaky in the joints but somehow whole in mind and body. McMeekin is a first-rate storyteller who cares greatly for his characters, who entertains his readers with a depth of feeling, who shows us how life is and how it could be if we’d just slow down.”

—Tommy Dean, author of Hollows

"Ross McMeekin can pack a whole life into a miraculously small space, compact it into a single page. From the complicated love between a father and son in the title story, to a boy running for his life with a mouthful of stolen seeds, this collection contains marvels of compression, characterization, strangeness, and imagination."

—Ash Davidson, author of Damnation Spring