Ramblings of Jeff Somers, author
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.
Brain the size of a planet, and what do I do? I write lame rock songs.
Herewith:
Song373
Song376
Song378
Song384
Song386
Song388
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.
I think there are like 500 rounds to this thing, and I don’t think I even win anything. I won my bracket in round 3, and now we’re on to Round 4. GO VOTE FOR ME, PLEASE! I am currently GETTING MY ASS KICKED. <bursts into tears>
Yet again, I find myself watching middling movies at 1AM and then feeling moved to comment on the writing. I don’t think there’s much demand for such services, yet here I am. Once again: I have little regard for spoilers, so if ye fear spoilers, go watch the movie before reading this. I am sloppy with the spoilage.
Black Death surprised me a little. I was intrigued by the premise and some good reviews I saw on random blogs – good reviews on random blogs (GRRBs) are not a good way to judge a movie’s overall quality, but they are a great way to detect otherwise hidden gems. Hidden gems have a lower bar in my mind – they can be bad movies, but with interesting moments or innovative ideas. So, I took a flyer on Black Death, and I was pleasantly surprised. Mildly, but still.
The first fifteen minutes or so dimmed my hopes, honestly. You start off with a date title card announcing it’s 1348. Add in an ominous voice-over (egads!) and a series of rather standard middle-ages images (filthy people, because people in the middle ages were filthy; monks in a monastery; dead bodies piled up like cord-wood everywhere) and you’re on a slippery slope. Throw in poor Eddie Redmayne playing a young, troubled monk (for what seems like the one millionth time), and then, my sweet lord, the ever-suffering Sean Bean playing Sweaty Man in Chain Mail with Conflicted Heart again, and it started to look like something made for pennies, possibly constructed entirely from outtakes of The Fellowship of the Ring and The Pillars of the Earth.
I mean, really, Sean Bean as a troubled, violent knight? The poor man. I like Sean Bean, and find him to be a charming actor. And yes, he looks good in chain mail with his dirty hair in his eyes, but can’t we give him a different sort of role sometime? When will his suffering end? HAS NOT SEAN BEAN SUFFERED ENOUGH FOR YOU JACKALS?
Ahem. Things, improve, though, once we get into the story. Which, in a nutshell, is: In the midst of the Black Death, a group of knights are sent to a remote village to investigate why the village has not seen a single case of the plague. They believe a Necromancer is using Dark Arts to protect the village, and the lead knight Ulrich, played by Bean, is determined to discover the necromancer’s identity, try them, and execute them. And possibly everyone else in the village, if he determines they are in league with the devil. They take a young monk (Redmayne) from a local monastery to be their guide through the marsh that makes the village so remote and difficult to access.
I won’t go into all the details of the story. What I will say is that the story is actually refreshingly straightforward and tight. We take our time at first, traveling with the knights and the monk for a while, which gives us a chance to actually identify them as characters. We see two encounters along the way which inform us as to their personalities, and establishes that the knights, for all their faith, are pretty savage, hard-bitten soldiers. And the characterizations are consistent – no one turns out to be the super secret bad guy at the end, no one has any sudden Complete Inexplicable Transformations at the end. The characters by and large behave as you would expect based on how they are introduced to you in this slow beginning section. Sad to say, this alone sets Black Death a little above most movies these days.
Once they arrive at the village, things get creepy. Ulrich pretends they are merely travelers seeking refuge, in order to suss out the Necromancer. The evil necromancer, a hot blond chick, manages to trick them all and capture them, and then turns the tables on them by torturing them and offering them their lives and freedom if they renounce Christ in a wonderfully perverted reflection of exactly what Ulrich planned to do to the villagers. If I have one quibble with the story, it’s that these battle-hardened knights who believe they’ve just entered a village awash in satanic power are pretty easily duped by the villagers in a way I saw coming five minutes before I started watching the damn movie; but while that part is pretty lazy writing it’s actually the only part of the film I would complain about, which ain’t bad.
The resolution of the story is nicely streamlined – there are no special effects, no bizarre twists. There are some twists, but in this debased age where M. Night Shyamalan has forced every movie of the last 15 years to have a Huge! Twist! Ending! That! Makes! No! Sense! these mild twists were actually organic to the plot, completely believable, and not even twists in the sense that you could have deduced them simply by paying attention. It’s also a pretty heartbreaking ending. Not shoot-me-I-can’t-stand-the-pain heartbreaking like the end of The Mist, but depressing enough.
The lack of special effects and horrible inexplicable twists was wonderful. The moment you hear there’s a “necromancer” in the story you might expect all sorts of bullshit effects, but Black Death takes a nicely realistic approach, imagining a village that is free from the plague because it is so remote, an evil, charismatic woman who takes advantage of the gullible villagers with just her personality and some basic pharmacological skills, and creates an atmosphere of dread from it.
It also manages to suggest that perhaps there is no difference between the faith of the villagers in their Protecting Witch and the faith of the knights in their protecting God, which is a nice bonus for an unassuming movie.
Overall, worth a viewing, I think. Especially if you’re a fan of Sean Bean at his most sweaty and dirty-looking.
Apparently the 5th Annual Book Tournament over at BSC Review is endless. I won my bracket in round 2, and now we’re on to Round 3. GO VOTE FOR ME, PLEASE! Pretty please? C’mon. I have so little. I need this.
Once again, I’ve been asked to answer a question. I will, as you may surmise from the title of this post, try to answer any question sent to me. Go on, try it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1xs_3WUeUfQ
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have my after-lunch cocktails to attend to.
I knew a kid in high school who had as a personal philosophy of life something he called MEMO: Minimum Effort, Maximum Output. I doubt this was original to him; few kids in Jesuit schools have original ideas. Originality is beaten out of us like sin. What this philosophy boils down to is to put the least amount of work into anything while simultaneously exploiting the situation to its fullest. I don’t know what that kid’s up to these days—probably dead, like just about everyone else I went to school with, most of whom perished in hellish flames while demons cavorted around them, just as the priests predicted they would.
Me, my time is coming. And I have absolutely no doubt that no matter how long it takes for said time to come, when it does there will be several priests from my school days present, no matter how many decades they themselves may be dead by then. As a matter of fact, I may spend the rest of my life trying desperately to adopt enough orphans and endow enough schools for the blind to avoid eternal damnation, just so I won’t have to hear Father Browning tell me that I was evil, and that was why he had to fail me in Religion class back in 1987. And then he’d tear off my pants with some sort of trick magician’s move and paddle my ass for the lord.
Not that anything like that happened in my Jesuit high school. Mostly, there was emotional abuse. And some light attempted cult brainwashing.
Anyway, over the years I’ve adopted MEMO and adjusted it for my own personality, mainly by lopping off the last two letters, leaving me with a simple guide for the rest of my life: Minimum effort. It’s short and easy to remember, and it really is the easiest way to the simple life, because it immediately lops off entire categories of action and effort. If you’re seeking a simple and uncomplicated existence, after all, you can’t necessarily put much effort into things, because effort spawns complexity—you have to seek out resources, marshal those resources, organize things, and then put the work in—any one of those stages can produce unwanted complexity in your life. The devil, after all, is in the details.
As an example, let us examine the disastrous nature of my haircuts.
Well, you thought you’d done your duty by voting me through round 1, but there are more rounds to come. Do you want your efforts to be for naught? FOR NAUGHT? Of course not. So surf on over to the BSC Review’s round 2 and vote for me over The Folding Knife by KJ Parker. I COMMAND IT. And also ask nicely.
From the Columbia Record & Tape Club to Amazon MP3s: My Musical Consumption History
PIGS, my first brush with what I’ll term Pop Music Snobbery Humiliation came in grade school. I was never a particularly hip cat, peeps; when I was very young I was wiry and quick and dreamed of athletic prowess, but something went wrong with me genetically as I got older and by the time I was ten or eleven years old or so I was a pudgy glasses-wearing nerd, and I drifted myopically through my days without too many worries. Generally, I was a happy kid living in my own little world. I had a few friends and I did well in school, and had few complaints.
There were, of course, a few bullies. There always are. I didn’t have a terrible time of it, but there were a few incidents. I don’t lay awake at night tortured by my experiences or anything, but there was one kid who was in my grade who occasionally liked to torment me, but usually there were juicier targets for him and I sort of coasted by in the usually rhythms of being almost-cool to being almost-outcast depending on the prevailing winds of grammar school. By the time I graduated to High School I was almost nostalgic for my grammar school, so obviously I didn’t have a Carrie-esque experience, but that one kid still irritates me in my memories to this day. It’s not like he beat me up or ever did anything particularly terrible, it was just that he sensed I was kind of not paying attention to the things that made you cool and liked to knock me around with my own lameness once in a while.
One of these moments was when everyone was suddenly discovering pop music and choosing their sides; I can remember one girl had a birthday party in class (we used to do that—every kid got a birthday in class; after three o’clock or something we’d move the desks out of the way, they’d bring in cake and soda, and we’d spend the last hour or two of the day having fun) and brought in some records to play. I’d never heard any of it, obscure things like “Physical” by Olivia Newton-John or “Safety Dance” by Men Without Hats—you know, minor hits I couldn’t be expected to be familiar with.
The kid who picked on me sometimes positioned himself as a heavy metal guy, naturally, and declared that Van Halen and Led Zeppelin were the greatest bands in the universe. I’d never heard of either. How is this possible in the early 1980s? You have to have a powerfully foggy brain, like mine. You have no idea how easily I can ignore things. No idea. Anyway, one day he demanded to know what my favorite band was. It was one of those grammar-school moments when you sensed that history had paused to make note of your response, and it would follow you—probably on your permanent record—forever. I didn’t actually have a favorite band, and I didn’t own any albums of my own (my parents had few rock and roll records aside from The Beatles, who I loved, but even I knew better than to name a band that had broken up 15 years prior), so I simply picked a band from the air and said Led Zeppelin, hoping this was sufficiently cool. My nemesis, no fool, demanded to know what my favorite album by Zeppelin was, and I couldn’t answer, and my humiliation was complete.
I vowed to never be so uncool again.
Over at BSC Review, they’re holding their 5th Annual Book Tournament, and The Terminal State is one of the competitors in the first round! Wo0t!
Although, I am currently getting my ass kicked. For god’s sake, go vote for me!
The legendary Ellen Datlow released her list of Honorable Mentions for the third volume in her “Best Horror of the Year Volume 3” antho today, and golly, my story from Crimes by Moonlight is on it. I’ve had two other stories picked as HMs by Ellen in the past (The Defragmentation of Thomas Crane in “The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror 18th Edition”, and The Script in “The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror 19th Edition”) so apparently I am in some sort of a an Honorable Mention groove. There are worse places to be.
This is great news, of course. I’ve made it one of those personal writing goals to get Ellen Datlow to either choose one of my stories for inclusion in one of her Best Of anthos, or to buy a story of mine. I have a lot of these little mini goals. I’ll either get them all or die trying. Probably literally, as I get all boozy and senile in my old age.