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.

POB Adventures

Author: jsomers October 13, 2015 0 Comments

Back when The Duchess and I moved in together (when I still put out a print zine), I got myself a PO Box here in Hoboken. At first she was puzzled; The Duchess has always regarded me as far too lazy to conduct a successful adulterous relationship, so she couldn’t figure why I would need a separate mailing address. I told her the truth: The Zine generated a lot of seriously random, seriously weird correspondence. Back in those halcyon days when The Inner Swine was being mailed all over the world by the thousands, I got some weird-ass shit in the PO Box all the time. I figured The Duchess didn’t want the sort of people who made zines and wrote ten-page letters about them (so, basically, me) to know her home address, and once she saw some of the stuff I hauled home from the PO Box, she heartily agreed, and to this day ranks it as one of the Five Good Decisions Jeff Has Ever Made (#1, naturally, is marrying The Duchess).

(Of course, I also used to get tiny sums of cash there as well as folks sent me anywhere from $2 to $50 for single issues, lifetime subscriptions, and other zine-related stuff, which was sort of great)

Today, the PO Box is a desolate wasteland, because I’ve stopped putting out the zine. In fact, the weird/cool correspondence dried up alarmingly quickly once I stopped mailing out the zine. But every now and then I get treats there. Today was one of those days. Here’s what I got.

Never Been to Mars by Larry Gent

A signed copy of Never Been to Mars by Larry Gent. Larry and I have corresponded a few times as he tries to lure me to various events, and he was kind enough to send me a signed copy of his new novel. Here’s the BCC:

Benedict hasn’t been the same since he returned home from Iraq. He’d seen horrifying things, had his leg pumped full of shrapnel and watched friends vanish before his very eyes. To make matters worse he returned home to find he’d developed psychic visions that he can’t control.

Now he lives his life alone in his house, hobbling to and fro on a cane, doing little else but watching endless streams of TV and movies. He doesn’t want to talk to people, he doesn’t want to see anybody; he just wants to be left alone with his TV until reality develops a laugh track.

But when his nephew goes missing, and the FBI starts calling it a kidnapping, Ben hobbles into action and uses the powers he loathes to save his family and find himself in a seedy world of other with powers, child kidnappings and murderous celebrities.

He already misses his TV.

A copy of Xerography Debt #37. Full disclosure, I write a column for this zine-review zine (with the nifty title It Means Its Wank), so I get a contributor’s copy, and am naturally not very objective about its value. Basically, XD has been a mainstay of the zine scene for a long time, and it’s a great place to start if you’re at all curious about the many, many self-published DIY publications that fall under the banner of “zine.” There are columns, as I mentioned, from folks with some connection to the zine world, as well as a plethora of reviews of zines of all kinds. That means every issue offers you a glimpse of hundreds of interesting, weird things you might otherwise never know about. Which would be sad. Also, I write a column, have I mentioned that? Worth the price of admission alone.

A copy of Fiddler’s Green, a pamphlet/magazine published “occasionally” by Wonderella, with a focus on “art and magic.” It’s truly a unique publication, beautifully designed and printed and ideal for languid afternoons spent day drinking and imagining you’re living another life.

There was also a freelance check in the POB, which I used to purchase this

Bullshit, More Shit I Gotta Do

You’re the Worst Gets Authorin’

Author: jsomers October 9, 2015 0 Comments

What is this thing your people call “shame”?

There’s a pretty-good-to-great comedy on FX right now called You’re the Worst. The premise is simple: It’s an anti-romcom, a story about two more or less immature, selfish assholes who get into a relationship and have to deal with the fact that they’re basically assholes, as are their friends to a large extent. It can be intermittently hilarious, as the show so far has walked a fine line between depicting its characters as believably monstrous without turning them into monsters. In short, I can often see the seeds of real human behavior that isn’t often depicted on your normally feel-good, stupor-inducing television in here.

But who cares about that, because clever TV shows are the norm these days (seriously, I am still recovering from the emotional black hole that was the Rick and Morty season two finale). I am not here to lather faint praise on You’re the Worst because it occasionally makes me giggle. I am here to lather faint praise upon You’re the Worst because it may be the first TV show in history to realistically portray what it’s like to be a published author who isn’t a bestseller. It’s so good it hurts.

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Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing

The City Without Walls

Author: jsomers October 5, 2015 0 Comments

This is a short story written long ago. Enjoy!

The City Without Walls

We’re all gonna die in the end.

I was curiously reluctant to go up to the three of them after the funeral. With the gray sky behind them and the wind playing with their hair, their ties, her skirt, they looked otherworldly, tall blond gods resplendent in their grief. I’d never known them all that well, in the first place. I didn’t really know anyone at the funeral any more—they were all people I used to know, now. Familiar faces, fatter and grosser than I recalled. Except for the Benderbys. Except for William Benderby, of course, lying dead and much changed in his coffin.

Looking at them made me feel ugly and stupid. Mickey Benderby, youngest, still glowing with athletic charm, blond hair almost white—he was, actually, almost an albino, so pale he might be transparent. But a healthy flush in his face made him boyish, and he dressed in dark clothes to give himself gravitas. He wore his expensive suit as if he’d been born in it, the gold cuff links not looking at all ridiculous on him, his windswept hair not too long, and agreeably messy, as if he’d swung out of bed in Amsterdam, boarded a plane, and arrived just moments before the ceremony, looking pressed.

Carol Benderby, the oldest, slim and blank-faced, stood next to Mick, smoking a cigarette, the wind stealing away the smoke as she exhaled it. She was beautiful, not as pale as Mickey, with a wonderful body and a steady, appraising stare that made men want to please her, to get some reaction from her. She turned to say something to her brother Daniel, and smiled in a low-wattage, smoky way that made her whole face seem to glow with untapped energy. I’d had a crush on Carol when we’d been younger, when I’d known William, but then I think everyone who met carol crushed on her. She was pretty and tiny and rich.

Daniel looked older than Carol, but wasn’t. He had cleaned up for the funeral but it hadn’t helped much; he still looked hungover. He was darker than his siblings, and his beard, though just shaved that morning, had already gathered like scummy storm clouds on his face. His tie was undone. As if by some will of their own his clothing was undoing itself—a button there, a knot here—until eventually he would be slovenly and sour, which was his natural state, so it was perhaps not surprising that he reverted to it instinctively. Still, he had an aura of command about him, the sense of a man used to being obeyed. He was the sort, I remembered, who instilled fear in people who didn’t know him.

Standing all together, the Benderby children—no longer children, but that was how I remembered them, a decade ago back in school—drew every eye, the natural subjects of all thought and conversation. Rich, talented, attractive people, related to each other, all still single and still mysterious. All the Benderbys were like that: Thick as thieves with each other. I remembered accompanying William home one semester break, when we were still enamored with the egalitarian world of college and thought maybe we could be friends, and being struck by how the Benderby family seemed to have endless secrets between each other. Secret ceremonies, passwords, anecdotes—over three days at the huge house in upstate New York, I’d been almost constantly confused. The Benderbys almost spoke in code. If you didn’t know the stories, the inside jokes, you were bewildered.

I never went back. William never invited me again anyway.

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Fiction, Free Short Stories

How Do You Deal with Your Encroaching Death?

Author: jsomers September 28, 2015 1 Comment

UNDOUBTEDLY how the universe sees my demise.

I get antsy whenever I don’t write much. I don’t deal with word count much, as word count is a stat porn for people who like stat porn (i.e., people who somehow think that a steaming pile of words is somehow an accomplishment in and of itself, or people who enjoy measuring the coffee spoons and afternoons of their life as if any of it aside from the finished product means anything at all) but I like to close out every day feeling like I’ve accomplished a lot of work. This is all I have, after all; no one is going to be talking about the way Jeff Somers revolutionized chess or how he re-invented the modern cocktail or that one classic guitar riff he wrote.

Chances are they also won’t be discussing my writing, sure, but it’s the only chance I have.

So, I get really freaked out any day that I don’t make progress in whatever projects I’m working on. It all has to do with my absolute terror of death, of course. As a man with no faith, no spirituality, and a liver the size of Maine, mortality is more or less all I think about. It’s all that drives me.

It makes sense; in school and when I had a day job I was that guy who left everything to the last minute, then did like 5 weeks worth of homework and project work in one evening, wild-eyed and desperate. And somehow pulled through with a decent grade or performance review, because I am a genius at skimming by. A fucking genius. Deadlines work for me, so why shouldn’t the Ultimate Deadline work more or less to motivate me to write in a constant panic? And also to drink heroic amounts of booze, yes. No doubt when death finally appears in my office, it’ll go like this:

DEATH: Jeff Somers, your time has come!

JEFF: Dude, I’ve been waiting. Have a toast with me!

DEATH: <examining the Jaba-like form of Jeff Somers> Hmmmn….I hadn’t counted on your liver being quite so … large. And glowing. And … hot? Is it hot? How does that happen?

JEFF: I got a deal on some Russian whiskey made in the general Chernobyl area.

DEATH: Hold on. I’ll need to call in some help. Do you know anyone who owns a truck and might be near death? A smoker, maybe?

If they ever invent immortality — and jebus, let’s hope they do — then I don’t know what I’ll do. Aside from procrastinate, probably by watching all 37 seasons of Rick and Morty over and over again and, yes, drinking. And I don’t understand people who don’t spend all their free time tapping at keyboards (or playing instruments, or shorting stock markets, or murdering people, or whatever it is that brings you joy) and just sort of hesitate. Like, I know a writer who has been working on one book more or less his whole life. It’s never ready, never done, and yet he hardly works on it. HUge swaths of time go by and he doesn’t touch it. It’s horrifying.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to spend the next few hours working on three manuscripts and making my way through a bottle of Russian whiskey that has an odd blue glow to it. Vashe zrodovye!

Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Writing

On Not Jumping

Author: jsomers September 23, 2015 1 Comment

The Future is SEXY

So: Peak TV. What a time to be alive. I’m old enough to remember when there was literally nothing on television. Nothing. You’d come home and have a choice between old Brady Bunch reruns and some awful afternoon talk show hosted by Morton Downey, Jr. or someone and after dinner you could watch literally some of the worst television ever made (literally) or sit in your room typing in BASIC programs from a magazine for six hours just to see a sprite of a rocket ship blip across your TV screen. That was Life Before, kids. No wonder any time a TV show that had anything at all resembling promise came along — an X Files or Twin Peaks — we collectively lost our shit. I recall watching the episode of Twin Peaks when Agent Cooper had the Dream Sequence and I nearly shit my pants because it was just so different from the dreck that was on TV at the time.

Of course, as a child, reruns of The Brady Bunch was just fine (also: reruns of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century with Gil Gerard, still my personal hero). What did I know? I still thought going outside and running in the street until I collapsed from exhaustion was a good way to spend my time. But here we are now living in Peak TV, a time when there are literally more good TV shows to watch than we have conscious hours in our lifetime. People view this as a blessing or a curse depending on their own particular TV-related traumas (and age; we’re moving into a time when kids will have grown up with nothing but Peak TV, and those fools will expect there to be a new Breaking Bad for them to watch every year).

The folks who think Peak TV is a curse tend t focus on the overwhelming nature of modern programming choice; it’s too much! Too many shows! These people are weak. The fact is, Peak TV has one basic benefit that is changing how we relate to programming that I personally am revelling in: We no longer have to jump.

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Bullshit, Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements

What Do You Do for Money, Honey?

Author: jsomers September 17, 2015 4 Comments

Jeff doing freelance writing research.

So, I decided to become a freelance writer, which is a story I’ve told before. Writing is my only marketable skill, after all. Despite our modern ways I have yet to find someone to pay me to drink copiously and utter drunken bon mots, and the idea of a Kickstarter or Patreon just doesn’t sit well with me. Nothing wrong with it, of course, but I don’t like the sense of obligation. I much prefer to write what I want when I want and then randomly publish it and beg for money in return. I don’t like promising a monthly delivery or something like that. It’s a road to trouble, for me. I’d wind up just passive aggressively hating all my supporters, writing stories about their gruesome deaths and creating temporary email accounts in order to send them drunken threats. So the whole crowdfunding thing is out.

But, sadly, writing novels hasn’t turned into the golden highway of money I was promised, so I need to hustle a bit, and so: Freelance writing. Today I’m having a pretty good time with it, writing about books at Barnes and Noble and About.com, writing about my hometown at Life in Hoboken, and doing a few other projects here and there. But in the early days of my freelance career things got dark, fast.

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Bullshit, More Shit I Gotta Do, Writing

“The Gift” and The Power of Expectations

Author: jsomers September 9, 2015 1 Comment

CREEPY PASTA

The film The Gift (written, produced, and directed by actor Joel Edgerton) will kill your soul, trust me; it’s got one of the most downer endings I think I’ve seen in a while. It’s an interesting film, because of the way it treats audience expectations: It treats them as tools it can use to tell its story and leave you stunned at the end.

Spoilers? Spoilers. Be an adult and read anyway.

On the surface, this looks like any number of slickly-made thrillers. Jason Bateman plays the cocky and sarcastic Simon in what you’d expect to be the standard Jason Bateman role. Rebecca Hall plays his apparently fragile and sweet wife, Robyn. Moving to California from Chicago for a “fresh start,” they run into Gordo, an old high school classmate of Simon’s who’s a little awkward and a little too eager to reconnect.

At this point, just about everyone in the theater assumes they know how this movie will go: Gordo will insinuate himself into the pretty couple’s lives, they will try to be nice, they will assume he is harmless, and by the time they realize he’s not harmless it will be too late: He will have learned their passwords, copied their keys, and framed them for crimes. In the end Simon will have to engage in horrific violence to defend his family and defeat the evil weirdo.

The movie knows that’s your expectation. It knows you expect Gordo to be insane and uber-competent until he makes one major mistake that is his downfall. It knows you will assume Simon, for all his urbane wittiness and aloof sarcasm, will be the hero by the end, and fragile, sweet Robyn will find her own inner grit as she helps her husband defeat the weirdo that invades their lives.

Yeah, not exactly. Which is to say–kind of? But Edgerton is smarter than that. He takes these expectations and plays us all for fools.

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Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

Rick and Morty is the Best Show on TV Right Now

Author: jsomers September 3, 2015 0 Comments

We’re All Going to Die! Come Watch TV.

There’s been some thinky things written about the “monoculture” recently, and its a concept I’ve bought into in the past — the idea that at some point in the near past there was a general consensus about what pop culture mattered. I mean when the final episode of M*A*S*H pulled in 106 million viewers in 1983, that was like half the fucking country at the time. It’s easy to decide that there was a time when we all experienced the same pop culture.

It’s both true and untrue. There were fewer choices, so we were all aware of stuff in a way we aren’t now. Now half my conversations involve locating overlapping TV shows or books or music to center a conversation; finding a TV show that everyone sitting at a table has watched and appreciated can be time-consuming, because we all make our own zeitgeist now. This is not a bad thing, really, and since it’s coupled with TV shows and other pop culture ephemera being accessible far longer than it once was (via streaming and DVD and Internet download) the zeitgeist evens out, slowly, as people go back to experience things they skipped the first time around. Back in 1993 if you were at all into Science Fiction, you were at least aware of The X Files, whether you enjoyed it or not. These days, shows can be on for years and not achieve any sort of cultural penetration.

Recently, the TV Show I use as my password to the Cool Folks I Want To Talk To is Rick and Morty, airing on Adult Swim. This is the best show on TV these days, and if you like science fiction chances are you should be watching this show, unless occasionally dumb and puerile humor ruins things for you, you humorless bastard.

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Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing

Win a Copy of “The Pale”

Author: jsomers August 28, 2015 0 Comments

The Pale: An Avery Cates Story

Hey kids! Interested in the new Avery Cates short stories and the newest release in the series, The Pale (out digital-ONLY on 9/15)? Well, you can win a physical copy of the story from Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist. Surf on over for the rules and enter for one of just three physical copies.

Here’s the summary: Continuing from The Shattered Gears and The Walled City, Avery tries to put distance between himself and The Angels and meets an old man with an unusual companion named The Pale. When they accompany Avery thinking he’ll provide them protection on the road, they come to regret it. Because someone’s hunting Avery.

Pre-roder it at Amazon, Kobo, and Google Play – Nook will be available on 9/15, as they don’t allow pre-orders. Good luck!

Avery Cates, BAM!

One Thing About “Mr. Robot”

Author: jsomers August 27, 2015 2 Comments

One “O” Away from EPIC

Mr. Robot, the first TV show USA Network has ever made that’s worth paying attention to (which is different from simply watching), has been making some waves–most recently because they postponed the finale due to the recent on-air shooting in Virginia.

I haven’t watched the whole season, but I’ve already formed an opinion about the show: It’s far from perfect, but in one specific way it’s the most interesting show on TV right now. No, not because of the nerdy computer stuff (which yes they get mostly right but JESUS do they hit that button hard; am I seriously to believe people actually say things like “Oh you’re running Gnome? I run KDE myself” in actual conversations?) but because it’s one of the only shows I’ve ever seen that does the Unreliable Narrator right.

Elliot, the main character, informs us (yes, us, the viewer) that we are a creation of his–an imaginary friend he’s created so he can talk to someone. He reaffirms this several times during the course of the show. In other words, the whole show is an exercise in breaking the Fourth Wall, and acting like the character is aware of our presence, watching him. Many things in the show are depicted from Elliot’s POV, and sometimes they’re a little off, a little weird.

There’s also the fact that the whole show, from the opening credits onward, is filmed like a 1970s horror movie. And that is also a good thing.

In addition, there are hints throughout that at least one of the characters Elliot interacts with isn’t actually real. Like I said, I’m not through watching the season yet, so this may turn out to be untrue, but it doesn’t matter. Because this show has so thoroughly nailed the Unreliable Narrator that I can’t be sure of anything that happens on it. And that’s pretty exciting, because the story is still compelling (enough) and well-written, so I also don’t care if it’s really happening.

Most shows and novels mishandle Unreliable Narrators, because they see them solely as a Twist Delivery Vehicle, and that’s because for most people Unreliable Narrators were invented by Chuck Palahniuk in Fight Club. Don’t get me wrong, Fight Club is a great book and film, but jebus, people, there are other uses for the Unreliable Narrator. For example: Unsettling your audience. Keeping them off-balance. Everything we’ve seen in Mr. Robot might actually be happening in-universe, and that won’t ruin anything. It’s not about the twist (if there is one), it’s about the artistry. My uncertainty about what’s happening on this show is pretty epic, and that is refreshing.

Deep Thoughts & Pronouncements, Someone Else's Writing