Jeff Somers

Jeff Somers is an American science fiction and mystery author born in 1971 in Jersey City, New Jersey. He is best known for the Avery Cates series, beginning with The Electric Church (2007), a noir-inflected dystopian saga about a hired gun navigating a collapsed future society, which Library Journal likened to Blade Runner. He followed it with The Ustari Cycle, an urban fantasy series about blood-magic practitioners starting with Trickster (2013). Somers has also written the nonfiction guide Writing Without Rules (2018) and published the long-running zine The Inner Swine since 1995, alongside experiments in digital and serialized fiction. His short fiction has appeared in various genre magazines, including a runner-up finish for Best Science Fiction Story in 2009.