Rock and a Hard Place Issue Thirteen: Winter 2025

Published February 19, 2025
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Musical genius brings the pain.
So does the stripper pole when it’s a grandmother-to-be . . .
Can it end well when a church needs a hitman?
“Oprah? You’re giving us Oprah?” Yeah. Just read it.

In Issue 13, Rock and a Hard Place goes places you’d never expect. Unless you’ve been paying attention, because we always find the noir.

Rock and a Hard Place is the literary magazine that knows that 13 might be unlucky for some, but if it wasn’t for bad luck, we’d have no luck at all . . .

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS
(In order of appearance of work)

JANE YOUNG’s (IG: @BoboLeBeq) stories have appeared in Rock and a Hard Place and Lumina, her plays have been produced Off- and Off-Off-Broadway, as well as regionally, and her short film “River” was screened at international festivals in New York City, Toronto, Brazil, and Houston. She lives in Baltimore, where she shares the joy and craft of writing with kids and adults through Writopia and The Writer's Rock. She'd like to thank SJ Rozan and the Badass Bitches for their always incredible feedback.

JIM VALENTI is a professional engineer fixing New York City's iconic bridges by day and a happily married father of three longing to sail off to Margaritaville by night. He spends half his time in the world of “What is” and half in the world of “What if,” fascinated by the human psyche and the mischief it is capable of. His wandering brain has yielded stories which have appeared in Short Story America Anthology Volumes 1 and 2, Murky Depths, Bards and Sages Quarterly, Bete Noire, Alien Skin, 52 Stitches, and Byline magazines. He recently self-published his first novel "Ice Pack" on Amazon Kindle—a minor league hockey redemption / dysfunctional love story with a deep twist.

VICTOR KREUITER’s stories have appeared in Sou’wester, Bewildering Stories, Halfway Down The Stairs, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Literally Stories, Tough, Del Sol SFF Review, The Windhover, Crimeucopia’s “Let Me Tell You About” anthology, and other online and print publications. His story, “Miller and Bell,” was included in The Mysterious Bookshop Presents the Best Mystery Stories of 2023.

GABRIEL HART (IG: @jailweddings) is an author and journalist from California's high desert. His debut novel, On High at Red Tide (Pig Roast Publishing) was published in fall of 2024. He's written countless short stories, including "Crossing Alvarado" (Rock and A Hard Place, issue 6), which was nominated for Best American Mystery and Suspense in 2022. Other works can be found in Shotgun Honey, Starlite Pulp, Punk Noir, and Expat Press. Hart was a columnist at Lit Reactor, a contributor at the Los Angeles Review of Books, and is now Editor-in-Chief at Beyond the Last Estate, a literature/arts magazine launched in 2024. He reports daily at Z1077fm.com.

JAMIE DIBS (Substack: jamiedibs.substack.com; Bluesky: @jamiedibs.bsky.social) writes thrillers, from spies to sci-fi. His day job in journalism involves following money, technology, and world affairs. He and his wife are based outside of the United States, ping-ponging around Asia and Europe, but he still roots for the teams from Philly. You can find serializations of some of his work on his Substack account, “Dark & Stormy.” He was born in the Year of the Dog.

KEITH ROYSDON (Bluesky: @keithroysdon.bsky.social) is a Tennessee writer who was a newspaper reporter in Indiana for 40 years, since high school. He won 30 journalism awards and co-authored four true crime books about the murderous little city where he lived. CrimeReads has published more than 60 of his pop culture pieces and his short fiction has been published by Punk Noir, Cowboy Jamboree (in the Motel anthology) and others. His 1984-set YA crime novel That October comes out in 2025.

BRIAN SILVERMAN’s (Threads / IG: @bs_silverman; Bluesky: @bssilverman.bsky.social) short fiction has appeared in Mystery Tribune, Mystery Magazine, Vautrin, Dark Waters, and Down and Out Magazine. His work has been included in The Best American Mystery Stories of 2018 and the Best American Mystery and Suspense Stories of 2021. He is the author of the novel, Freedom Drop, to be reissued in April 2025, and Calypso Blue, also to be published in 2025. He lives in Harlem, New York.

Raised on both a farm in north Georgia and the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago, RAYMOND J. BRASH (Bluesky: @rjbrash.bsky.social) currently resides in Denver, Colorado, where he enjoys reading and writing speculative fiction, noir, and anything that crushes multiple genres into a pulpy, edible mash. Raymond has stories in Shotgun Honey, Punk Noir, and the National Flash Fiction Day’s Online Journal’s FlashFlood, where he was nominated for a Best of the Net Award. Learn more at https://www.raymondjbrash.work/

PRESTON LANG (X: @Langreads) is an honest, Ontario-based writer. He's written a number of novels and screenplays, and his short fiction has appeared in Grain, N + 1, Ellery Queen, and Best American Mystery Stories 2019 and 2021.

ERYK PRUITT (Threads / IG: @yonderbarnc; Bluesky: @erykpruitt.bsky.social) is a screenwriter, author and filmmaker living in North Carolina with his wife Lana and cat Busey. His short films “Foodie” and “Liyana, On Command” have won several awards at film festivals across the US. In 2015, he was a finalist for the Derringer Award for his short story "Knockout" and in 2018, his third novel, What We Reckon, was nominated for the prestigious Anthony Award. He produced and wrote the eight-part, true crime podcast The Long Dance about the North Carolina Valentine's Murders. His latest novels are Something Bad Wrong and Blood Red Summer. He can be found either at his desk, hard at work on another story, or mixing drinks at his bar, Yonder, in Hillsborough, NC.

GABRIELA STITELER (Threads / IG: @gabrielastiteler) is a writer based in Portland, Maine where she lives with her husband, children, and rescue lab Jack, who was born in a Mississippi dump and hates trash day. Gabi grew up in Northwestern Pennsylvania on a steady diet of paperback books from the Golden Age of Detective fiction, classic noir films, and Spaghetti Westerns. She’s especially partial to classic tropes reimagined and twisty plots. Lately she’s been thinking about how bad a person can be before they’re irredeemable.

MIA ALTAMURO (Threads / IG: @streamofsocialconscience) a twenty-one-year-old freelance writer for local news from New York. She is a semifinalist in the Blank Theatre Young Playwrights Festival, and has been published in several magazines and online news publications such as Heroica, The Little Rebellion, Mixed Magazine, Toad Hall Editions, Lupercalia Press, and Handbasket Zine. She is @streamofsocialconscience on Instagram, Tik Tok, Medium, and Youtube. Her social media presence is a combination of creativity and social analysis.

CONTRIBUTING ARTISTS
(In order of appearance of work)

JAMIE GILL (Instagram: @jamie_gill_photography) is a singing mailman, unknown photographer and ex-chef, though he still cooks for his wife. His passions include family, this planet, music, literature, food, and photography. He refuses to wander this world with his eyes closed, and believes you will always find another perspective, if you look hard enough.

JIM THOMSEN (Threads / IG: @thomsenjim) is an editor, photographer and writer who lives in Kingston, Washington. His fiction and nonfiction has appeared in Noir City, Pulp Modern, Switchblade, Shotgun Honey and several other publications. He sees his "noir" photography as a subtle form of satire on the idea that noir is increasingly a matter of style rather than theme (he's strictly a theme guy), and that noir can be everywhere if you choose to see it as a visual-first concept.