by: Gabriel Tait
Series: Meeks
Genre: Psychological Fiction/Thriller
Release Date: September 1, 2023
A CANADIAN PSYCHOLOGICAL NOVEL
Ranleigh Meeks believes a better life is waiting for him. He is right. That is where the trouble begins.
Meeks follows one man’s increasingly desperate pursuit of the person he believes he was meant to become. Darkly funny, emotionally raw and deeply unsettling, it asks how much of ourselves we can abandon before there is no one left to come home.
by: Gabriel Tait
Series: Meeks
Genre: Psychological Fiction
Release Date: October 27, 2025
Ranleigh Meeks has survived the one thing he cannot forgive himself for. Now he has to say it out loud.
Six months sober, Ranleigh sits across from his sponsor with a tape recorder and a promise to leave nothing out. The Ranleigh Tapes is intimate, darkly funny and devastating, a confession about shame, memory and the courage required to tell the truth.
I’m well, thank you. Thanks for having me.
You’re welcome. You are the author of the Meeks series, starring Ranleigh Meeks. Can you please tell me about him?
Ranleigh is twenty-seven in both Meeks and The Ranleigh Tapes, although in the second book he’s talking primarily about his childhood in the seventies and eighties.
Ranleigh has had a difficult life. He didn’t have the easiest childhood, and by twenty-seven, his life hasn’t turned out the way he hoped. He’s working in a warehouse, struggling with addiction and isolation, and feels he’s living below his potential. He spends a lot of time imagining a better life for himself. That distance between what he hoped for and what his life has become is central to Meeks.
His imagined better life offers an escape, but addiction and self-deception make the boundary between that imagined identity and reality increasingly unstable. He is an isolated, troubled protagonist whose choices have consequences, rather than a straightforward hero.
Tell me about the people we’ll meet in Meeks the story.
There are quite a few people we meet in Meeks. From Ranleigh’s childhood, there’s his grandmother; Miss Hewitt, her pretentious, old-fashioned friend; Joe Parsons, the fireman; and Dallas Cooper, the washed-up rodeo king.
In his adult life, there’s Ron, a giant of a man nicknamed the Cardboard Man, who works with him on the night shift at the warehouse. There’s Jimmy, the unhinged but well-meaning security guard, and Jimmy’s controlling mother. We also meet Blaireau, Ranleigh’s micromanaging boss, and Stas, a Russian drug dealer.
Tell me about the book, Meeks.
Meeks has two distinct timelines. The first part is set on the Prairies in 1979, during Ranleigh’s childhood. We then move into his adult life in Toronto in 1997.
The prologue opens early Sunday morning, setting up what is to happen toward the end of Part One. We then go back to Saturday morning and follow the events leading up to it, bouncing between Saturday and early Sunday. Without giving too much away, the intent is to mess with the timeline a little and keep the reader somewhat off-kilter. There’s a reason for that, which becomes clear as you read the book.
Meeks was originally released in 2023. Readers have praised the book for its dark humor, gripping narrative, and your ability to transport them into the scenes and have them rooting for Ranleigh. How much of you is in Ranleigh?
The characters are entirely fictitious. I’ve been sober since October 27, 2001, and that perspective informs my writing about addiction. I don’t think I could have written Meeks early in my own sobriety. By the time I wrote it, I had been sober for nearly two decades, so that experience informed the emotional landscape.
Currently, there are two books in your Meeks series, Meeks and The Ranleigh Tapes. You have a third book planned for next year. Do you plan on more books after that?
Echo will complete the trilogy. I won’t write any more about Ranleigh after the third book. Whether I write any more books after that remains to be seen. I have no plans at this point.
You say that the third book, Echo, will be your last time writing about Ranleigh, and you don't know if you'll write again. Why is that?
Writing has always been a means to an end for me. I took up writing to tell the story of Ranleigh Meeks, and once the third book is complete, I will have done just that.
Over the course of the series, how has Ranleigh changed and were you surprised by any of those changes?
Ranleigh has gone through immense change over the course of the series. In Meeks, we follow his descent into active addiction and a pretty low bottom. In The Ranleigh Tapes, we revisit his childhood and understand where he comes from and why he is the way he is when we meet him in Meeks. We also start to see him recover as he enters twelve-step recovery.
His biggest change will come in Echo, the third and final book in the series. There will be tremendous change in that book as his character arc is completed.
I haven’t read the books, and I’m not an expert on addiction. My thoughts are that something happened to push Ranleigh into addiction and something happened to make him decide he wanted to change. Can you talk about those events?
That’s a difficult one to answer without giving away the story of both Meeks and The Ranleigh Tapes. What led him into addiction and what brings him to the point of wanting to change are central to those books. I’d rather leave that to the readers to discover as they go.
Far enough. When a reader finishes reading Meeks and even The Ranleigh Tapes, what do you hope they take away from the stories?
I hope readers come away entertained, but also with a deeper understanding of addiction. I want to make them think and envelop them completely in another world. I hope they come away richer for having had the experience.
Gabriel, thank you so much.
Chapter 1
SATURDAY, JUNE 23, 1979, 9:30 AM
Ranleigh Echo Meeks opened his eyes, breakfast was well underway. Grandma wanted him to be well-fed and cleaned up for the long day ahead. Ranleigh loved waking up to the smell of her cooking. Unlike at home, where meals were usually haphazard, she always prepared a generous spread and more than he could finish. Home, which now seemed like a distant dream, never made him feel as hungry as the prairie did. Despite the fact that at home he often left for school without eating, and if a proper meal was ever served, it would only be on Sundays—usually consisting of KFC, potato salad, and a bag of chips. Those meals felt like holiday meals because they happened so rarely. After eating, he would succumb to a sleepy feeling, much like after Christmas dinner. Ranleigh didn't like that feeling. Feeling full made him too relaxed and therefore vulnerable to attack. At home, he preferred being hungry. At home, he preferred to be awake.
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