Author Archive: jsomers

Jeff Somers (www.jeffreysomers.com) was born in Jersey City, New Jersey and regrets nothing. He is the author of Lifers, the Avery Cates series published by Orbit Books, Chum from Tyrus Books, and We Are Not Good People from Pocket Books. He sold his first novel at age 16 to a tiny publisher in California which quickly went out of business and has spent the last two decades assuring potential publishers that this was a coincidence. Jeff publishes a zine called The Inner Swine and has also published a few dozen short stories; his story “Sift, Almost Invisible, Through” appeared in the anthology Crimes by Moonlight, published by Berkley Hardcover and edited by Charlaine Harris. His guitar playing is a plague upon his household and his lovely wife The Duchess is convinced he would wither and die if left to his own devices.

The New Style

Author: May 10, 2012 1 Comment

Don Draper Does Not Get ItFriends, I like me some Mad Men. It’s one of the many television shows I ignored at first, smug in my resistance to marketing and hype, then watched in a marathon On Demand a few months after the first season ended, initially out of bored curiosity, then out of sincere excitement. It is an excellent show, written well and delivering subtle pleasures so consistently it’s hard to remember that the show is written and acted, and not just naturally generated from imagination, sunlight, and liquor.

Full disclosure: The show’s love affair with whiskey usually inspires me to drink a fifth of Rye during every episode, so my opinion of the show is … colored.

Anyways, I just watched episode “Lady Lazarus”, which I won’t bother summing up here because, why would I do that? Go watch it, you lazy bastards. Or find the eleventy-billion recaps out there waiting for your greedy eyes. This obsession with recapping the plots of TV episodes has got to stop. You know what’s really interesting about this episode? The fact that every single review or write-up about the episode I’ve seen mentions how much they paid to license Tomorrow Never Knows by The Beatles for it ($250,000).

Now, I’m a huge fan of Tomorrow Never Knows. It is a kick-ass song and is on a short list of songs that I think should never be seriously covered or re-imagined, because it is pretty much Awesome in musical form. And I think it was used wisely in the show, demonstrating to us that Don is not young and hip any more, and then demonstrating to us that he has no interest in being so any more. It’s important, I think, because Don is forty years old. In today’s age, forty is not so old any more. Forty year-old men today can be found at the same rock concerts as their kids. But back in 1966, friends, forty was fucking old. I’m sure there were some hip forty year-olds, but Don is certainly not one of them, and they used this song as a perfect way to demonstrate that: First of all, he can’t even tell a Beatles song from some horrible knock-off, and secondly, when he does give it a listen, he switches it off after a minute, disinterested.

All well and good, but for so many people, the big news was that they paid the whopping quarter-of-a-million bucks to use the song. Which is a lot of money. But why do we care so much? In today’s media-saturated world, it’s not so much that we’re so used to looking behind the curtain, there is no goddamn curtain any more.

I’m not saying this is a bad thing. It’s just interesting. Writers and other creative folks making these books and shows and movies are basically flim-flam artists. We fool you, we con you. We make you feel for imaginary people. We get you outraged at imagined atrocities. We trick you, over and over again. So it’s disturbing to realize how many tricks are no longer, strictly speaking, tricks any more, since y’all seem to know all about them.

It’s a challenging time. You know how you read books or see TV shows from 50 years ago, and they seem kind of simplistic and dumb and you know how they’re going to end like on page 2? Yup, because the audience is smarter now. Not in a general-IQ kind of way. In a media way. The tricks don’t work as well as they used to. These days, you buy a license to use a famous pop song from the ’60s and not only does everyone comment on your choice of music and what it means to the narrative, they also know exactly how the business works. They know you have to pay for that song, they know the song is expensive because of who wrote it, and they kow that as a result it was chosen very carefully.

I mean: Fuck. Where’s the mystery?

Of course, in a novel I can reference songs all I want, as long as I don’t print the lyrics. Titles can’t be copyrighted, so I can have my narrator cue as many damn songs as I like and hope the reader just hums along. Assuming they know the song. If they don’t, it goes awry – although, in the age of Spotify, that really isn’t a problem. In fact, if you’re writing a novel with a lot of song references, why not put together a playlist and be all 21st century and shit? Why not. Your readers will figure it out anyway.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

JEFF SOMERS WANTS TO BE THE POET LAUREATE OF HOBOKEN, NJ.

Author: May 8, 2012 5 Comments

Dear People of Hoboken,

As one of Hoboken’s literati, I have been scanning the pages of the local papers for my name on what can only be described as an obsessive basis.. Unfortunately, there have been no mentions of me. This distresses me. Although I am sure the local Hoboken papers are not causing me this distress on purpose, it remains a fact that the Hoboken free press teased me with a week of interest in my existence and then, just when I thought they were serious, dropped me like a hot potato for the next “flavor of the week“. I think you people owe me something, especially when you consider how much money I spend in the local bars, which is a lot, unless I can convince someone else to buy me drinks. Which isn’t easy when your face isn’t on the front page of the local newspapers, dig? So we come back to the central point: how can the Good People of Hoboken help a guy out and get him some free cocktails?

I have also noted, in a not-totally-unrelated-although-it-might-seem-so-at-first matter, that Hoboken does not seem to have a Poet Laureate. This really stuns me, as most class-act municipalities and nations have one. I had to go look up who the Poet Laureate of the United States is, and it’s Philip Levine, which is startling because, when you think about it, everyone’s first reaction to that is probably “Who in the world is Philip Levine?” I’m kidding, of course. I know who he is. A man who has not left a college campus in almost his entire life, and probably has forgotten what other human beings look like. Likely Mr. Levine peers out from his darkened lair with his fishbelly pale eyes stinging from the direct sunlight, and then he composes haunting poetry about how he hates all the Normals who mock his Phantom of the College existence, which he then mails off to the President. Who doesn’t read them.

Which brings me back to my point: I would like to be named Poet Laureate of Hoboken. There are many reasons for this. One, I would be a lot more charismatic and interesting to talk to (especially over a few gratis rounds of Killian’s Irish Red at, say, Stinky Sullivans, on you) than a freakish shadow-monster like the Poet Laureate of the United States. Two, I live in Hoboken and am the first person, apparently, to think of the idea. Three, I have crippling bar debts that threaten to force me into sobriety, and I could really use some sort of stipend from the government. Four, I think it would be very cool if I could introduce myself at parties by whipping out a striking business card that read, simply, JEFF SOMERS, POET LAUREATE OF HOBOKEN. Finally, I have actually written poetry, and while none of it specifically mentions Hoboken, quite a few deal with the horrors of hangovers, and that could arguably be symbolic of Hoboken. Here’s a sample Haiku:


“A DTs morning,
rats in red smoking jackets!
why do you mock me?”

I would appreciate the Good People of Hoboken‘s help in bringing the “Somers for Poet Laureate” movement to the attention of our mayor, whoever that is, and the other illuminati who run this city. Thank you.

Bullshit

The Futility of Writing

Author: May 3, 2012 5 Comments

The following originally appear in The Inner Swine, Volume 11, Issue 4.

until drops of blood form on your forehead

The Futility of Writing

Brain Surgeon. No, really.

Brain Surgeon. No, really.

PIGS, when I was but a wee little one in Jersey City, before the standing-on-a-corner-drinking-blackberry-brandy period, I wanted to be a brain surgeon. The reasons for this desire are now obscure; possibly it had something to do with The Six Million Dollar Man. Possibly it was simply an easy answer to the endless questioning by tiresome adults about my career plans—adults were always asking us kids what the fuck we wanted to be when we grew up, and Brain Surgeon was a good response as it got a lot of grins and impressed gestures from the questioner. I coasted along with the whole Brain Surgeon thing for a few years, probably giving my poor parents—who probably hoped I’d magically evolve into some sort of athletic prodigy and earn scholarships to pay for school—a lot of sleepless nights as they contemplated the roughly 55 years of medical school such a profession requires.

Of course, I didn’t really want to be a brain surgeon. The only ‘profession’ I’ve ever desired is Writer, and as every writer in the world knows, the ‘profession’ of Writer is similar to the ‘profession’ of Sorcerer: Very cool sounding but usually only existing in movies and fantasy stories. Because no one makes any money at writing, ever, so it isn’t really a profession. But when I was six I didn’t realize writing was something I might someday palm off as a profession while standing on line for my food stamps, so Brain Surgeon it was.

And then, some time around grade three, I began to slowly realize that in order to become a Brain Surgeon, I was going to have to master math. Shortly after that came the aforementioned  standing-on-a-corner-drinking-blackberry-brandy period, and that was the last I thought about a career until I was twenty-two, waking from a lengthy alcoholic haze and realizing I needed a job, and right quick. And also too a change of clothes and a bath.

Somewhere in between, I sold my first novel, White Rabbit.

(more…)

Bullshit, The Inner Swine, Writing

Mission Impossible 2

Author: April 27, 2012 1 Comment

In Which Tom Cruise Appears to Grin Mischievously for 2 Hours Straight.

AWESOME

AWESOME

I had dinner with fellow author Dan Krokos the other night. As usual, dinner with Dan always ends in horror, hangover, and humiliation. This time the horror, as it so often does, came courtesy of Tom Cruise. Dan insisted that Mission Impossible 2 was a good – nay! Great! – movie, and resisted all attempts to talk sense to him. I haven’t seen MI2 since it came out in theaters in 2000. As with just about everything else from 2000, I have very little memory of it. Just a vague sense of the ridiculous, lingering shots of fire and doves and the long-haired version of Tom The Cruise which we have all tried to forget so very hard.

So, being a basically fair and decent human being, I offered to re-watch MI2 and write a little something about it, good or bad. To see if perhaps my memories of it were skewed, if it was a better movie than I remember. To be frank, it’s a little difficult to get past Tom Cruise’s hair. WHY IS IT SO LONG AND GIRLISH?

And, to be honest it isn’t as terrible as I remember. There’s a decent action movie buried in there. It’s just suffering from Attempted Awesome Failure. There are soooo many things in this movie that are just ridiculous. If you take one second to think about aspects of the plot or the action sequences, they start to fall apart, even though the basic premise of the movie isn’t a bad one.

This is a movie, after all, that is guilty of a plethora of style-obsessed sins. Everybody taps at their keyboards when “hacking”! Every action scene has extended slow-motion takes, often repeated as if the film editor had some sort of nervous tic (so we can marvel at teh AWESOMENESS over and over, I suppose)! The ridiculous MI masks that make you look exactly like someone else, right down to sweat level and beard growth, are used so often it’s actually a comic effect by the end. Those masks were super dumb in the series, in the first movie, and forever. This movie uses them as plot points no less than three times. Maybe more. There was some flicker-related epilepsy while watching this movie.

On a larger scale, sense is sacrificed on the altar of AWESOME a few times as well. There’s a scene towards the end when Ethan Hunt has to break into a secure office building in order to destroy the horrible virus. It’s an awful scene, because Woo keeps cutting between the Bad Guy, who is predicting exactly what Hunt will do, and Hunt actually doing it, and it plods. Now, to show that the Bad Guy, a former IMF agent, is smart and knows Hunt well enough to predict his moves isn’t a bad plot idea, but the scene is so badly edited we keep stopping in our tracks for the Bad Guy to tell us what we’re about to see. Jebus.

And then, despite predicting exactly what his enemy will do … the Bad Guy allows him to do it anyway.

And then, when Hunt is attempting to break into the building by diving into an airshaft his teammates are trying to open for him, he dives before they have actually opened the airshaft, for no apparent reason.

And then, once inside, hunt moves with an elephantine slowness while trying to destroy every trace of a horrible virus that could kill everyone in the world. He moves like he’s wading through Jello, which Woo apparently thinks escalates the drama.

And then, in order to get a momentary advantage after being pinned down by the Bad Guys, Hunt sets off several powerful explosions in a laboratory that houses deadly viruses. My god, he just killed us all and we won’t even know it for a few weeks.

This sequence alone should have killed this film series.

The ending, of course, gets a lot of negative attention, but really isn’t the worst thing about the movie. Sure, there’s a lot of unnecessary slow motion. And pigeons, because doves would have been ridiculous somehow. And fire. And motorcycles. And yes, that final kick where Ethan Hunt, like Neo in The Matrix, learns how to manipulate the fundamental laws of physics and somehow kick a gun out of the sand into the air so he can catch it and shoot the Bad Guy a few times.

For that kick alone, John Woo should be mocked wherever he goes. It’s the sort of move little kids make up when playing cops and robbers: Now I kick the gun into the air and catch it!

So: Mission Impossible 2: Not a good movie, but you can see the decent movie it’s hiding under its bloated, awful carcass, I think. Something tells me there’s a good script version 1.0 somewhere, ruined by several layers of AWESOMEING. Which is now a word, for truth.

 

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

Busy Weekend

Author: April 22, 2012 3 Comments

Jeesh. I am right now as I type this sitting in an Au Bon Pain in New Brunswick, on College Avenue. Where I attended college, actually, though my memories of this period of my life, as with any period of my life, are vague. I wandered about a bit thinking, ah, yes, I have stood in this spot before, but that’s about as far as my creaking old brain goes. College Years Jeff might as well be some other person.

IN fact, this Au Bon Pain wasn’t here when I attended school. I am outraged that the universe evolves without my direct participation.

I’m here because The Duchess is running a half marathon. Yesterday, we got up early and drove down here to pick up her bib, and it was frustrating because there were absolutely no signs anywhere telling you where to go, and my memories of Busch Campus are as vague as my memories of everything else, resulting in us driving around for a while while I frowned and mumbled things like “Ah, I think I went to a party in those apartments once …”

For the record, The Duchess does not care where I went to a party once.

So, we ran late in getting the race bib, and then had to race into Manhattan to participate in “The Future: What Does It Mean” event sponsored by Asis&t Metro. Fellow author David Louis Edelman and I had been tapped as Science Fiction authors to declaim on our vision of the future and information technology and such. It was a lot of fun and I really enjoyed David’s presentation and the conversation that ensued, despite arriving in a flurry of harried incompetence, having forgotten all my notes, books, and other items in my rush to get there on time.

David Louis Edelman impressed me, and I’m really looking forward to reading his books, and so should you. For serious.

Then, The Duchess and I had to rush back to Jersey to attend a dinner that had been in the works for a few weeks which we also barely managed to make on time. And then, drunk and full, I went home and to bed. Which means subjectively, yesterday took about three minutes to elapse.

And now I’m back in New Brunswick, having dropped The Duchess off, sitting in Au Bon Pain waiting for her to finish the race. This weekend didn’t even happen, from my point of view.

Bullshit

Jeff in the Wild

Author: April 18, 2012 0 Comments

Guess what? I’ll be here blathering on about the future and such on Saturday:

http://www.facebook.com/events/309056385827702/

WHAT: The Future, What Does it Mean? (sponsored by Asis&t metro)

WHERE: Hotel Pennsylvania, New York, 401 7th Avenue, 33rd Street, New York, NY 10001

WHEN: Saturday, 4/21, 2pm – 5pm

I’ll be there with fellow author David Louis Edelman (Infoquake, MultiReal, Geosynchron), and others to discuss “the information landscape of the future and the skills required to navigate this rapidly changing terrain.” I can only assume I was invited to be the comedy relief.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, More Shit I Gotta Do

Not a Movie Review: The Cabin in the Woods

Author: April 16, 2012 3 Comments

The Cabin in the WoodsFriends, I saw The Cabin in the Woods over the weekend. It’s rare these days that I actually buy into hype and get excited about a movie, but this one grabbed me. It just looked mysterious and cool, like that kid at a high school party smoking weed right out in the open, wearing sunglasses, and you’re fifteen and you see him and think, shit, if I could just hang out with that dude I’d be set for life.

So, this isn’t a review. I liked the movie a great deal, but everyone in the universe is reviewing it and breathlessly praising/criticizing the twists and turns and the premise, which is so huge and ungainly it either works for you or doesn’t, frankly. It worked for me. Enough said.

No, what I’m most excited about is the five minute sequence towards the end of the film where everything goes batshit insane. I think of this moment as the Natural Batshit Moment. Warning, I’m a gonna spoil the heck out of this movie.

The Natural Batshit Moment in a story is when you come to a point in the plot where something you’ve set up long before is sprung into action and the pace of the story goes into overdrive for a bit, careening off into complete joyous insanity – but it feels natural, like a piece clicking into place instead of a desperate attempt at injecting life into your moribund plot. Towards the end of The Cabin in the Woods, our two surviving sacrifices make their way down into the corporate offices. On the way they encounter a selection of the supernatural horrors kept in cages for use in their ritual sacrifice to the Elder Gods – it being revealed earlier that the evil they summon to destroy them all are trucked up in an elevator – and when pinned down by a cleanup SWAT team of sorts, they notice a huge, candy-like PURGE SYSTEM button. So they press it, releasing the horrors hidden under the cabin in waves, delivered promptly every few minutes by the dinging elevators.

Put aside the silliness of a PURGE SYSTEM button like that – we’re talking a universe where giant spiders and Pinhead-knockoffs are kept in glass cages to be delivered unto unsuspecting, drugged teenagers. Forget the silliness, and just sit back and enjoy the insane spectacle of the buttoned-down corporate environs being invaded by the nightmare creatures they’ve been serving upstairs as part of their jobs. This is batshit territory, but the story earned it. One, we’re shown how subdued and corporate the basement areas are – these fucks are killing innocent teens as part of their jobs. Two, we pretty much know the creatures are selected and delivered already, so the “storage system” isn’t too much of a stretch. Three, it doevtails nicely with the protagonists being pinned down with no way to fight back – except to purge the system.

The sequence that follows is fantastic. The quick shots of nightmare fuel killing the salarymen and women are quick and creepy. The throwaway scenes of people committing suicide rather than be taken by their worst nightmares are brutal and done with the right touch of blank affectlessness. The chaos, the panic – it all feels right. These people might work for some ginormous conspiratorial nightmare factory, but they woke up that morning, drank some coffee, went to their day job, and started making plans for diner. And then someone released the monsters, and the place became a massacre.

The rest of the movie is OK. Better than most, worse than others. This one sequence, however, will always raise The Cabin in the Woods up beyond the mediocre for me. When structuring plots it’s always hard to come up with a Natural Batshit Moment. You always want that crazy moment of freefall, that exhilarating sequence where plot points come together and send the reader/viewer on a brief gravity-free mission to fuck yeah. But it’s hard to pull off. The Cabin in the Woods pulls it off, and for a few minutes there every time the elevators dinged I almost cheered.

So there.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

Monday is Guitar Day

Author: April 8, 2012 0 Comments

Epiphone Les Paul CustomDespite my best efforts, people continue to not request that I post more guitar songs, so I keep having to do so despite the lack of public clamor. You people are killing me. As punishment, I’m going to post more anyway.

Herewith:

Song480
Song481
Song482
Song488
Song489
Song490
Song491

The usual disclaimer: 1. I admit these are not great music; 2. I claim copyright anyway, so there; 3. No, I cannot do anything about the general quality of the mix, as I am incompetent.

gee-tar