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.

I Been Interviewed

Hola! I was interviewed by the very smart and funny Larry Gent (whose first novel is coming out soon) over at 42webs:

2) What research goes into a book centered on self mutilation? (insert obvious emo music joke)

I think your standard issue adolescence is all that is required, actually. Including the Emo Music. Which we all have far more of then we’re ready to admit. J’accuse!

In other words: None research. None whatsoever. That’s how I like to roll: Ignorant and defensive.”

Go check it out and tell me how cool I ain’t.

Spring Breakers: MY EYES! THE GOGGLES DO NOTHING!

Bikinis 4 LifeLet’s start off with a definitive statement: Harmony Korine’s movies are awful, and we are all lessened by viewing them.

However, sometimes people mature. To be fair, Korine has matured, and Spring Breakers does have a method to its awfulness, I think. The fact that it remains awful is part of the point: This film is meant, like most of Korine’s film, to irritate. So, I didn’t enjoy it. I actually had a curious lack of reaction to it, really: When it was over I honestly wasn’t sure if I had enjoyed myself or not. Or stabbed myself in the eyes or not.

I’ll say two things about this movie that are semi-coherent.

1. Korine Makes Partying Look Painful. This is, I think, a triumph actually. Korine manages to make a film about four nubile college-age girls who spend much of the film wearing bikinis, snorting drugs, and engaging in SexyTime dancing that is about as titillating as a Root Canal. After watching this film the last thing I want to do is go down to Florida and party with the coeds. And he does this with some skill – there’s no abrupt moral event horizon. No one gets sick (in fact, these chicks bust out the coke and booze constantly and never once seem to have a single moment of physical suffering for it) and no one has a bad date-rapey moment. Korine manages to make partying look just as exhausting as it actually is – the sort of good time you have to ingest chemicals to even tolerate, much less enjoy.

2. Korine Uses Irritation Effectively. One technique Korine uses over and over again in the film is an annoying repetition. Lines of dialogue and images are repeated, sequences shown again, and the repetition is continued until you want to claw out your eyes. Curiously, though, this means that when he finally cuts to a new scene, your sense of relief is visceral. I think this has to be on purpose, judging from how often he uses the trick. And it works. It put me on the edge of my last nerve and when he finally switched to a new scene – even if that scene was three girls in pink ski masks holding guns singing a Britney Spears song – I was psyched to see this new scene just because it was new. It’s an interesting effect, if not an enjoyable one.

So, clearly Harmony Korine is not a hack: He’s a thoughtful filmmaker who makes films the way he wants to, with goals and artistry. I simply find the finish products pretty irritating, and that’s fine. In the end, if you’re looking for a movie about boobs, sex, and drugs, you should look elsewhere, despite the fact that there are indeed boobs, sex, and drugs in this movie. If you’re looking for a movie with characters instead of soulless, expressionless puppets in bikinis, look elsewhere.

If you’re looking for a movie wherein James Franco appears to be slathered in some sort of Sex Grease, then this is the ticket you have been looking for.

Ask Jeff Anything Open for Business

As most of you may recall, a few years ago I challenged everyone to ask me anything and I’d make a video response. Over the years I’ve had a lot of fun with that, but the last one I made was about a year ago. What can I say? It was a busy year and I am pretty much incompetent. I let it slide. That’s what lazy incompetent dudes, do, after all. Here’s a collection of previous Ask Jeff Anythings.

But, things have calmed down for the moment, so I’m ready to get back in the Ask Jeff Anything swing. So this is an open invitation/reminder. Ask me about my books, my writing, my personal hygiene, my cats (you know you want to), my childhood, my dangerous drinking binges, my hatred of pants, my theories on life, baseball, and rye whiskey, my upcoming projects, my obsessive and disturbing cleaning, my zine The Inner Swine, other people I know, other people I don’t know, celebrity culture, movies, other writers, book trailers, Godzilla, the Eurozone, the Many Worlds Theory, the Higgs Boson, Linux, guitars, music, Don Camillo, the infield fly rule, how to play an F Chord, blogging, growing up in Jersey City, marriage, writing, the correct way to drink whiskey, exactly what chord is played at the beginning of A Hard Days Night, college life, Miller’s Crossing and whether it is the greatest movie ever made (it is), the terrible television my wife makes me watch, the 1978 Chevrolet Nova’s charms and deficiencies, whether Liam Neeson will make a good Matt Scudder in the upcoming film, Downton Abbey, whether Breaking Bad or The Wire is the greatest television show in history, guitar solos, kittens, how to clean your house, the decline of the Roman Empire, the Fall of the House of Usher, whether or not there’s a bottle of red wine I won’t drink (there probably isn’t but research continues), my published short stories, or, you know, anything else.

So go on and email me a question or leave on in the comments and I will start making these sad, ridiculous videos again. Sure to disappoint, confuse, and irritate.

Steve & Steve’s Startling Shadow Show

The Duchess and I were bored this past weekend and saw The Incredible Burt Wonderstone. I would not recommend this movie. But it reminded me of an imperfect short story I wrote a thousand years ago, give or take, when I was in college. This was actually inspired by Penn & Teller after I saw one of their shows in NYC.

Steve
&
Steve’s
Startling Shadow Show
by Jeff Somers

The theater was small but the act was big, so the place was packed, a humming crowd of expectancy. The posters outside showed a tall, handsome man smiling in a tuxedo, one hand comradely on the shined shoes of an obviously hung man. The poster declared it to be “Steve and Steve … Performers with a Twist.“

The lights were still up, stage hands occasionally jogging to and fro on the stage while casually dressed people waited politely, chatting and pointing out stage details where they could see them. Men talked to their wives and girlfriends carefully, arms loosely around shoulders in civilized signs of possession. Groups of singles scattered like islands in a sea of matrimony chatted amongst themselves and occasionally flirted. Everyone’s eyes kept flicking to the stage, waiting for the fun to begin.

They talked, low and calm: they traded favorite tracks and skits – the hanging of the second Steve was quite popular, but it was an old favorite; most people thought of the much newer suicide bit, first done in New York a few weeks before, where the whole front row got splattered in warm stage blood. It was new and almost no one in the theater had seen it. The people in the front row particularly hoped it was included, thinking that a bloody shirt would be a perfect trophy from the show.

Slowly, the lights dimmed.

(more…)

No Great Trick

NOTE: This story originally appeared in The Drexel Online Journal, which no longer appears to exist, in 2003.

No Great Trick

By Jeff Somers

1. Black Magic

It was about the time that Norm Cashman began practicing black magic in his little closet of an office that I met Debbie, the most uninhibited receptionist to ever refuse to sleep with me in a long and proud tradition of women refusing to sleep with me. I can remember the time exactly because Norm caused quite a ruckus before he got fired, what with the dead chickens and the black smoke leaking from under his door. It was during a fire drill caused by one of his spells gone awry (involving, from the smell, burning animal fat) that I met her, a tall brunette in her thirties who turned to me in the chill of an early morning and began saying some of the filthiest things I’d ever heard uttered. I was delighted, of course. I stood next to her for fifteen minutes with a grin on my face the size of my erection and wondered if this was the universe’s way of paying me back for all that acne back in high school.

It wasn’t. Although of course I asked her out (34 times to date) she has never so much as shared a cup of coffee with me. She will freely and gladly describe sexual acts and concepts I had until-then thought arcane and possibly mystical, she will gab on and on about all manner of kinks and fetishes and apparatus until I am red-faced and incoherent, but she only smiles slightly and shakes her head when I beg to buy her dinner, gifts, mansions, whatever. I have grown to hate her, in a way, so I call her twice a day.

I was on the phone with her (being put on hold every few minutes so she could answer the other lines and do her job), amazed at how smoothly she could go from “Good morning, Denton Incorporated” to a lengthy discussion of the true meaning of the phrase “ribbed for her pleasure” without any signs of transition, when Norm finally got canned. He’d been chanting in his office all morning, casting some mighty incantation we were all ignoring more or less by habit, when they came. They being Mark Fillmore, Human Resources Director, and Phyllis Gumber, Director of Outside Sales, Norm’s boss. Apart, they were just about the ugliest two human beings I had ever seen. Together, however, their ugliness sort of canceled itself out, leaving them moderately blurred and possibly bland. We all knew Norm was getting canned, and we just kept talking on the phones and tapping our computers as if we’d seen dozens of forced departures, which, of course, we had.

Norm, however, wasn’t ready yet. As they entered his office he let out a cry and there was some sort of purple flash (I only saw it out of the corner of my eye and my mind was occupied with Debbie’s descriptions of the sensual properties of latex) and the door slammed. Then, nothing for about a minute, as Debbie moaned on into my ear about rubber.

When the door opened, Norm was preceded by a thick cloud of smoke, and then he ran into the maze of cubicles yelling “I’m invisible! I’m invisible!” while most of us just stared and held down anything we didn’t want him grabbing up in his frenzy. He dashed around the cubes for a while despite the fact that no one was chasing him, and then disappeared into the halls.

I glanced over at Phil Dublen, and our eyes met. Silently, we said to each other “Who gets his office?”

They eventually found Norm’s clothes down on the 17th floor, but as far as I know they never found Norm that day. Of course, once they were sure he had left the building, they stopped looking.

(more…)

Sábado es El Día de Guitarra

Epiphone Les Paul CustomSomeday my agent is going to ask me how it is I have time to compose, record, and post these terrible musical pieces when I have contractual fiction obligations, and when that day comes I am fleeing to Mexico with my entourage. Which is what I call my cats.

Mock them while ye can:

Song544
Song552
Song556
Song555
Song554
Song562
Song564

If anyone wants to hire me to play their wedding, I take payment in top shelf liquor.

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.

Dredd

The Chin.Random thoughts on yet another movie. I’m a simple man; I long ago gave up any pretense of being particularly smart or perceptive. Most of my political opinions are borrowed and I lose every argument I engage in out of an apathetic lack of passion. Yet, even I am moved to opinions, mostly about low-calorie entertainments where the bar for critical mining isn’t too high. So: Dredd, starring Karl Urban and Olivia Thirlby.

I am not a fan of the Judge Dredd comics. In fact, I am only tangentially aware of the character Judge Dredd, and most of the information I know about it comes from the truly awful Sylvester Stallone film from the 1990s. Though how that can be is a mystery because I will never admit to having seen it. Moving on.

So, I don’t know shit about Judge Dredd. Due to some interesting reviews, I took a flyer on the reboot starring Karl Urban as The Chin a.k.a Judge Dredd. And damn if it wasn’t a pretty good movie. Is it a good Dredd movie? I have no fucking idea, knowing nothing about the comics. But as a straightforward sci-fi action flick, it was surprisingly good. Of course, there’s a certain amount of low expectations going on here. I didn’t go in expecting something great, and was pleasantly surprised. But there are some lessons here, I think.

Dredd works because of three key decisions the filmmakers make:

1. There’s very little exposition. They not only say fuckit to the origin story and drop us in a universe where Judge Dredd is already well-established, they also barely bother to set anything up, and this is a good thing. A few lines of expo drop like metal weights at the very beginning (voiceover, and my toes curled in horror, but it’s just two lines and then it’s done) and a few more as they introduce two other characters, but that’s it. The exposition is really minimal, which is such a fucking relief.

2. The plot is really simple. And I mean, simple. Unlike a lot of other sci-fi films that seem to enjoy cramming a lot of truly superfluous plot into ninety minutes, Dredd is lean and mean. They cut that sumbitch down to a straight line, so much so that I can give you the plot in one sentence: Dredd and a rookie Judge respond to a routine homicide at a huge, dilapidated housing tower ruled by a vicious drug lord and must fight their way out when they are trapped inside. That’s it. It might sound dull, but the reductive quality of that straight-line plotting works.

3. The Rookie was a good idea. It’s a cliche to have the grizzled veteran paired with the fresh-faced rookie for a reason: It works. This allows Dredd to flesh out the characters, the nature of the world and the nature of the Judges in an organic way. It also allows the character of Dredd, who’s pretty grim and boring on his own, honestly, to have someone to play off of.

So, a masterpiece? Not at all. A fun way to spend $1.99 on a weeknight? Sure, why the hell not. Karl Urban never once takes the helmet off, and I liked that, and the man does more acting with his chin than you might suspect. Lena Headly as the villain is cold and underplayed, which works well, though she has almost zero dimension. But it’s a lot better than the scenery-chewing a lot of actors would have brought to the role of a murderous drug lord hell bent on killing two Judges trapped in her building.

The effects – I heard a lot about the effects in this movie. I didn’t think much of them, good or bad — they were just there, really. There were, however, a few shots that I thought were kind of cool, including the final shot of Headley’s MaMa coming to her grisly end – it was gruesome and somehow beautiful all at the same time.

The Journey

So, Trickster is out. Huzzah!

I started writing this book in 2010. It’s amazing sometimes how you start with a germ of an idea and then end up somewhere far away from that. Here’s the first ~850 words I wrote for this book. I trashed this (and several versions afterwards) before settling on the final approach in October 2010; much of this is still in the final version, though in a different form, and spread over many sections.

Trickster Draft Zero, August 2010

WHEN I was nine years old, my father picked me up after one of my Cub Scout meetings at the old church, which was strange because my father had left us the year before and I hadn’t seen him since. He drove an old boat of a car, cracked seats and broken radio. I remember climbing around the front and back seats, so much room it was like a little portable house on wheels. He let me; he just sat behind the wheel with a pint bottle of brandy between his legs, humming old songs as he drove.

We merged onto an empty highway, amber lights driving away the darkness but creating a weird Marscape of road, like we’d left the real world behind and were driving in the Ghost World. I didn’t know where we were going. Dad took regular sips from his bottle and answered all my questions with grunts and monosyllables. I had a lot of questions. I remember being really excited, after all this time Dad had come to take me on a trip, and after I got tired of not getting answers to my questions I settled into the back seat with my Webelos handbook and tried to figure out where we were going—amusement parks, zoos, the beach all seemed likely candidates. Eventually I remember falling asleep, liking the sensation of rocking back and forth in the big back seat, the smell of cigarettes and the sound of the wind.

Dad shook me awake and we were out in the middle of nowhere in the parking lot of a small square tavern with a huge red neon sign that said, simply, BEER. I followed him sleepily inside, where a handful of people who all seemed to be wearing flannel shirts and baseball caps were scattered around the tiny, gloomy room. Dad lifted me onto a stool and I remember slouching there, still asleep, looking owlishly around.

“Bourbon,” Dad said. It was the first time he’d spoken since he’d picked me up. “Neat. A coke for the kid.”

This was magic. The man behind the bar, who was fat and red in the face, his gray-white hair greasy and pasted flat against his round head, put a glass in front of me with a grin and used a gun on the end of a rubber hose to fill the glass with soda. Soda from a hose! It was magic, and I immediately schemed to have one installed at Mom’s house, because she always forgot to do the shopping and there was never anything to eat or drink.

Dad didn’t pay any attention to me, just sat there staring at the silent TV mounted up on the wall and sipped from his glass. Any time I finished a soda the man behind the bar waddled over, smiling, and refilled my glass. Free soda from a hose. After a while I eased off my stool and wandered over to where a trio of ancient electronic games sat blinking dully. Dad watched me for a moment, then shrugged and called the bartender over, fishing out a five dollar bill and holding it up.

“Give the kid some quarters,” he said.

I drank soda until I had to pee so badly my legs ached, and played fifteen games of bowling before finally giving in to the realities of the situation and heading for the bathroom. It was a scary bathroom. It had a door that didn’t close right and was dark, everything in it cold and slimy. To get there I had to pass by an old man of at least my Dad’s age sitting at the end of the bar. He wore a white suit with no tie or socks, just white pants and jacket that seemed too light for the weather and a white shirt. He was a mass of wrinkles. His hair was long and slightly curly, and his nose dominated his face, making him resemble a squirrel. I didn’t want to push past him to get to the bathroom, and hesitated for a second or two while my kidneys swam up behind my eyes, bulging them out. Finally I screwed up my courage and hustled past. He just grinned at me.

###

I got bored after a while. The games were old and creaky and not fun and after my seventh or eighth soda the impossible happened and I didn’t want any more of them. Dad just sat and drank and stared. I was afraid to make much noise or bother him, remembering how terrifying he was when angered, and tried to find other ways to amuse myself. I looked around and found the man in the white suit staring at me. He smiled and waved, and I looked away. When I stole a glance back at him, he waved again, and I realized with a start that his fingertips were on fire. As he moved them back and forth through the air they flickered and smoked.

The flames were blue-green. As I stared the man winked at me.

I looked around, but no one else seemed to have noticed. Everyone else might as well have been asleep. Not me. My heart was pounding