ADVANCE PRAISE

 “…Below the Falls” comes with abundant Northwest flair.” - The Seattle Times (full article)

“There is a quiet ungovernability at work in the short stories of Ross McMeekin, the sense that a repressed tempestuousness awaits beneath the surface.” - X-R-A-Y (full interview)

“McMeekin’s new collection, Below the Falls, offers a diverse collection of stories about characters navigating their lives with courage, dignity, humor, and so much more.” - CEASE, COWS (full interview)

“Rather than dealing in pat answers, McMeekin offers the whole of each character, giving us a way of looking at people with authentic curiosity and a lack of judgment.” - Necessary Fiction (full review)

“The stories in Ross McMeekin’s collection Below the Falls are both fantastic and breathtaking, and always imbued with humanity.” - Largehearted Boy (full playlist)

“Sometimes I think of good flash as a murmuration of starlings.” - JMWW (full interview)

"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

“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

“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

“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

"The Hummingbirds: A Novel by Ross McMeekin is the book I’d recommend for anyone with a soft spot for a well-written psychological thriller."

- Literary Hub

"McMeekin builds a world where secrets, desires, and an obsession with appearance are all that matter. His writing has a cinematic quality: lush descriptions of mist lifting off the pool in the dark of night, or grotesque accounts of the cult’s devotions and abuses...In Hollywood everything is given a sheen of perfection, and its devotees are committed to maintaining the charade. And as the novel reaches its conclusion, Ezra discovers what people are willing to do to preserve their delusions."

- Commonweal

"There’s something different about Ross McMeekin’s debut novel, The Hummingbirds, a fresh sincerity combined with dark humor. McMeekin writes with a dreamlike haziness that prevents The Hummingbirds from becoming the literary equivalent of an effects-driven action movie. Instead, it’s a quiet, sometimes tender meditation on the authority of desire--the influence we give it and the influence it has over us."

- The Chicago Review of Books

“The Hummingbirds is a literary beach read that isn’t afraid to steer its characters into grim territories, a modern noir that’s easily consumable, but which contains evocative character beats…the result is a nimble excursion into a time-honored genre.”

- Vol. 1 Brooklyn

"The Hummingbirds is about the hollow truths at the hearth of the glamorous lie that is Hollywood."

- The Seattle Review of Books

"The Hummingbirds is existential contemporary noir with West Coast gothic vibes."

- Necessary Fiction

"This Hollywood-set novel has a noir plot but an uncynical soul."

- The Stranger

"The Hummingbirds is a transfixing and hugely propulsive novel, a dark and rich tale twisted through with secrecy and danger, ambition, loneliness and love. The book also beautifully captures the insanity of Los Angeles, the film industry, and the people who occupy -- however fleetingly -- that precarious and mesmerizing world." 

- Peter Mountford, author of A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism and The Dismal Science

“With sly wit and piercing intelligence, Ross McMeekin’s novel traverses the classic terrain of California noir and manages, almost miraculously, to render it anew. Echoes of Cain, echoes of West, and yet even as the lush, light-struck world of swimming pools and starlets is rendered in all its nearly-sinister invitation, the book sneaks up on us with a startling and profound empathy. The Hummingbirds is truly beautiful.”

- Matthew Specktor, author of American Dream Machine

"Readers of The Hummingbirds will find themselves in a hard world softened by the people who live there. Ross McMeekin’s smart, stylish novel is as sexy as they come; even its edginess is forgiving. And on another note, McMeekin's female characters rock."

- Abby Frucht, author of A Well-Made Bed

"The Hummingbirds is a literary page-turner that delves unflinchingly into the dark side of the American Dream. Set against a background shaped by religious fanaticism, adultery, violence, and Hollywood glamour, this story sheds an unforgiving light on the dangerous ways in which we betray those we love--as well as our better selves. Ross McMeekin has written a remarkable book."

- Clint McCown, author of Haints

"Ezra, our main narrator among the threesome, is a compelling sort of anti-hero, a Proustian "watcher" of the world's pleasure-takers. He sees but can't quite bring himself to believe how beauty may corrupt, turn poisonous. The Hollywood set of this book—its glitter and seduction—entices us to feel a similar pull towards all that appears beautiful . . . even sensing our eventual emergence into the dark underbelly. The layers of storylines and perspectives are masterfully done. Bravo. A riveting read."

- Nance Van Winckel, author of Quake, Boneland, and Ever Yrs.

“Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,” Rilke says in the epigraph to The Hummingbirds, Ross McMeekin’s stunning debut novel, and the story that follows certainly bears out the truth of those words.  Told from the perspectives of a beautiful, sexy starlet, her nefarious producer husband, and their handsome young groundskeeper, the morally tortured son of a cult leader called the Prophetess of the Apocalypse, the novel is a dark, suspenseful meditation on beauty and the devastating consequences of the privileges it grants.  It is a beautiful and terrifying book, one that will make you think of another famous line from Rilke: “You must change your life.”

- David Jauss, author of Nice People and Glossolalia