Meteor Storm is populated with men--fathers, brothers, uncles--who struggle with the missteps in their pasts and endure, sometimes with resignation, sometimes with a puzzled and angry dissatisfaction, their present lives.
Set in the 1960s and 70s, many of the stories in Meteor Storm revolve around Red Rock, Ontario, a mining town where it is never easy come and easy go. The narrators of these 14 tales are in transition to adulthood, where the questions of what masculinity is, or needs to be, in the modern world are at are presented, in stark and often violent ways.
In "Sunrise" the calm of an early morning is disturbed by distraught young man bringing news of two horrible deaths. "Walleyes" recounts how a lazy vacation afternoon among friends can devolve to the cusp of violence. And in "Red Rock and After" (winner of a Canadian Magazine Fiction Prize and a Journey Prize finalist) a family suffers through a string of bankruptcies, but retains their optimism about the future.
Tefs's writing style is spare, direct, and reflective and he offers a unique view of where hard-edged men crash into the limits of their power.