The Freaks Are Winning: The Inner Swine Collection - Softcover

Please buy our book. We're cold and hungry, and there are wolves after us.

Jeff Somers was born in 1971 in Jersey City, New Jersey during a violent electrical storm. After an unremarkable childhood spent eating crayons and playing baseball badly, a series of head traumas resulted in a sudden interest in writing. The years 1980-1983 were spent re-creating The Lord of the Rings with different character names, a policy which would have continued had a kindly grammar school teacher not defined the word plagiarism for the young man.

In 1989, while preparing to attend Rutgers University in New Jersey, Jeff sold a science-fiction novel to a California-based publisher called The Andromeda Press, despite the fact that the photocopy Jeff had submitted lacked pages 79, 143, 187, 209, and 331. Letters were exchanged, contracts were signed, and a few months later The Andromeda Press went out of business and were never heard of again.

In school, Jeff avoided any kind of actual academic work, co-produced a public access cable show about comic books (despite having no knowledge or interest in them himself) called The Rogue's Gallery, and found the literary- minded students to be stuffy, pretentious, and in dire need of vicious criticism.

After graduating college, Jeff drove cross-country and wandered aimlessly for a while, but the peculiar siren call of New Jersey (a delicious mixture of chromium, cut grass, and indolence) brought him back to his homeland in 1994, where he got a job as an Editorial Assistant at a medical/science publisher in New York City. Most experts agree that this is likely where the young man went insane.

In 1995 Jeff began publishing his own magazine, The Inner Swine, which is currently in its eighth volume, boasting a subscription list of over a hundred, some of whom actually paid for it. The Inner Swine is written almost exclusively by Jeff, featuring short stories, commentaries, poetry, and other, less-definable stuff. It is distributed by Tower Records and Desert Moon Periodicals.

In all, Jeff has written over 300 short stories (about 20 of which he is willing to show to the public) and has had his work published in Another Chicago Magazine, Aberations, The Portland Review, The Whirligig, and Angry Thoreauan, among others. He has also co-authored "Sliders: Blood and Splendor", a one-shot comic book published by Acclaim Comics in 1996. He's not sure if he's proud of that, but it paid well, so he doesn't think about it too hard. In addition to Lifers, Jeff has also written six unpublished novels, although three of them were written during his teen years and probably contain more angst than is wise to reveal to total strangers.

In-between slacking off at work, publishing his own zine, and tirelessly accruing rejection notes, Jeff plays chess and staves off despair with cocktails.