Last year, I read Andre Dubus III’s Such Kindness (2023) and Daniel Gumbiner’s The Boatbuilder (2018), two novels featuring characters who have made bad decisions and are, at times, extremely unlikeable. While reading these novels, I sometimes asked myself if I wanted to keep going. The stories in Ross McMeekin’s Below the Falls altogether evoke a similar unease and offer a salutary invitation to sit with that discomfort. 

The collection’s title story starts quietly with a peaceful scene of a father and son on a fishing trip. The boy has a prosthetic eye from a past injury, but the circumstances of the injury remain unclear. The story opens with a simple portrayal of the comfort of being in nature:

The father liked that the air smelled of damp earth and vegetation. He also liked to hear the uninterrupted sounds of the wind, waking birds, weed stalks rubbing together in the shallows, and the occasional gurgles and slurps of slow-moving water. 

The story slowly turns ominous. It is revealed that the mother doesn’t want the boy around his father. There’s a rifle on the scene. The boy wants to be loyal to his father, a man who was abused and is now struggling with his conscience. Violence becomes normalized for both father and son, and others are easily tricked into denial. No characters are named. There is only the boy, the father, and the mother. A lesson in McMeekin’s stories, one that assigning no names drives home, is that these characters could be any of us, depending on circumstances.

It’s safe to say that McMeekin’s characters know their best days are behind them. Even when they try to change their circumstances, they cannot. “Glass” is narrated by a man who has unexpectedly lost his job and is selling his belongings at a garage sale. He agonizes over having to sell his beloved fish tank, home of an expertly crafted underwater world that brought beauty and calm to his life. Another man, aware he holds the power over the narrator and looking for a bargain, wants to buy the fish tank in order to keep a snake in it. 

‘A snake.’ He laughs. ‘I know. But once you capture it in glass, it’s easier to believe it loves you back.’ ‘It’s a shame, isn’t it?’ I say, and he looks at me like he’s lost. We’re more alike than he’s pretending we are. We’re all of us alike. That’s the problem. 

Even when McMeekin’s characters haven’t hit rock bottom, there are tensions between what they want to do, what they can or will do, and whether their circumstances can be changed at all. In “Togetherness,” McMeekin uses the aftermath of the pandemic to highlight the significant gaps between those who have access to unlimited resources and those who do not. A father watches as his daughter struggles to engage with the other kids after isolating alone during the pandemic. He then learns that many of the other kids have been gathering together every day with a private in-home teacher. “American Ice” follows a man trying to leave a band after it has run its course and finding it hard to make the change. As Cory and his bandmate climb an icy mountain, Cory tells his friend he’s quitting the band. The ice shifts beneath them, and Cory wants to turn back. His friend insists it’s safe to keep going, and Cory gives in—again. The ice breaks, but even after the near-fatal accident, Cory can’t seem to summon the will to oppose his friend and create a new future.

The collection displays McMeekin’s range—realism mixed with fantastical stories, settings in a wide variety of places, longer stories combined with flash fiction. “Keeper of the Strays” reads more like a fairy tale than McMeekin’s more realistic stories but provides a take on violence that blurs the line between criminals and victims of crime. “Switchback,” “Tusks,” and “Ripe” contain more magical realism. While McMeekin’s range is impressive, the result can feel overloaded, obscuring what holds these stories together as a collection.  

McMeekin’s “Tonight We Are Kings” follows a homeless man addicted  to alcohol for a night as he hangs around outside a sports arena. The homeless man reflects on growing up as a hockey player in Minnesota. Even though he worked hard, his bad grades and small-time connections meant he would never be in the NHL. Instead, he enlisted in the military—a heroism that is more complicated than being a hockey star.

I’m glad I’m someplace crowded, someplace where people are having fun, where people are on their way to cheer for something as meaningless as hockey. It makes me happy to know that inside the Staples Center men will make millions of dollars skating around on an ice rink, trying to sling a puck into a net, huge crowds cheering them on.

After the game, as a mother and son filter past and the young child stares at him, the man recalls how his father would tell him not to make eye contact with homeless people. It’s easy for a person on the good side of luck to say that another person’s unfortunate circumstances are the result of bad decisions, but that avoids the possibility that one day, their own luck could run out. The stories in Below the Falls raise difficult questions: Who is beyond hope? Does everyone deserve a second chance? What makes us want to look away rather than strive to create a society that extends lifelines to people in distress? 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.  

+++

Ross McMeekin is the author of a noir, The Hummingbirds (Skyhorse Publishing, 2018). His short fiction has appeared in 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.

+

Emily Webber lives in South Florida with her husband and son. She has published fiction, essays, and reviews in the Ploughshares blog, The Writer, Five Points, Split Lip Magazine, Saw Palm, Hippocampus, and others. Learn more at emilyannwebber.com.