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Rock and a Hard Place, Issue 7: Winter 2022
That stand-up sure knows how to bomb.
Delirium tremors and haunted houses might be a bad mix.
The high end gets down and dirty (and bloody).
The cat and the tattooist and the old lady and the missing man.
With this issue, Rock and a Hard Place takes lucky number seven and uses it as a knife straight to the ribs. Feel the luck bleed out in these stories of bad decisions and desperate people.
With stories Jason Allison; Rusty Barnes; Nils Gilbertson; Jim Guigli; Chris Harding Thornton; James Lilley; Bobby Mathews; James McCrone; Estelle Phillips; Mark Rapacz; J. Rohr; Ali Seay; Rob D. Smith; Daniel Vlasaty; Christopher Witty; Gregory Wolos; and Mike Zimmerman.
Rock and a Hard Place is the magazine that takes noir beyond crime to the world at large. On the run from your past? Need a dead-end job? Got a no-hope scam? Our authors are here for you.
Delirium tremors and haunted houses might be a bad mix.
The high end gets down and dirty (and bloody).
The cat and the tattooist and the old lady and the missing man.
With this issue, Rock and a Hard Place takes lucky number seven and uses it as a knife straight to the ribs. Feel the luck bleed out in these stories of bad decisions and desperate people.
With stories Jason Allison; Rusty Barnes; Nils Gilbertson; Jim Guigli; Chris Harding Thornton; James Lilley; Bobby Mathews; James McCrone; Estelle Phillips; Mark Rapacz; J. Rohr; Ali Seay; Rob D. Smith; Daniel Vlasaty; Christopher Witty; Gregory Wolos; and Mike Zimmerman.
Rock and a Hard Place is the magazine that takes noir beyond crime to the world at large. On the run from your past? Need a dead-end job? Got a no-hope scam? Our authors are here for you.
275 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 17, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 2, 2023
Many fine authors in this issue, including me. My Bart Lasiter story, Looking for Mishka, will make you catatonic.
January 20, 2022
“These are noir times we’re living in, through no fault of our own. And there’s a comfort, almost, in reaching for noir when life gets grim. Sort of like reading advice columns or relationship advice on Reddit. It puts your life in perspective…But if these days have proven anything, it’s that we’re all a little bad luck away from being the main characters in our own personal noir.”—excerpt from Associate Editor Libby Cudmore’s forward
Issue seven contains oodles of quality hard luck noir. The following stories are my favorites.
“Big Daddy” by Rusty Barnes features a single mother with a crappy job cleaning rooms at a Poconos resort. Becoming Big Daddy’s snitch for some extra cash might just turn her into a different type of cleaner.
“Drying Out” by Nils Gilbertson is a haunting tale of an alcoholic trying to dryout while housesitting for a friend. I found the ending delightfully disturbing.
In “Negative Tilt” by Bobby Mathews, Corey’s new gig earns him $125 to deliver a dose of bad luck to a former colleague.
“As Long As You Look Faraway” by Rob D. Smith involves two young female thieves who find a scary surprise in a motel room. “Rachel gave her a hand lifting the mattress off the bed frame. This was usually paydirt for them. A Crackerjack box that always held a prize. You may not like what you got but you always got something.”
In “One Last Round” by James Lilley, a double crossed boxer seeks revenge.
In “The Birder” by Gregory J. Wolos, a retired emergency veterinarian turned children’s book author makes a run for the Mexican border with a pregnant woman he meets at his book signing event.
The “Fun with Rock and a Hard Place” gives the reader an opportunity to collaborate with the editors on a noir story.
Issue seven contains oodles of quality hard luck noir. The following stories are my favorites.
“Big Daddy” by Rusty Barnes features a single mother with a crappy job cleaning rooms at a Poconos resort. Becoming Big Daddy’s snitch for some extra cash might just turn her into a different type of cleaner.
“Drying Out” by Nils Gilbertson is a haunting tale of an alcoholic trying to dryout while housesitting for a friend. I found the ending delightfully disturbing.
In “Negative Tilt” by Bobby Mathews, Corey’s new gig earns him $125 to deliver a dose of bad luck to a former colleague.
“As Long As You Look Faraway” by Rob D. Smith involves two young female thieves who find a scary surprise in a motel room. “Rachel gave her a hand lifting the mattress off the bed frame. This was usually paydirt for them. A Crackerjack box that always held a prize. You may not like what you got but you always got something.”
In “One Last Round” by James Lilley, a double crossed boxer seeks revenge.
In “The Birder” by Gregory J. Wolos, a retired emergency veterinarian turned children’s book author makes a run for the Mexican border with a pregnant woman he meets at his book signing event.
The “Fun with Rock and a Hard Place” gives the reader an opportunity to collaborate with the editors on a noir story.
February 23, 2022
my friend (!!!) is in this so i may be moderately biased but his story (The Trunk, first in this issue) is 12/10. i don't make the rules. other standouts include but are not limited to Estelle Phillips' Tenderness and Chris Harding Thornton's Dead Man's Cocktail. Tenderness especially is visually stunning, and The Trunk is fantastic character work and wit, up there with my crime favorites.
brb need to catch up on all RaHP issues so far.
brb need to catch up on all RaHP issues so far.
February 10, 2022
Admittedly, I’m biased.
September 20, 2022
I haven't read every issue of A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE, an occasional compendium of crime fiction edited by a who's who of the genre's indie stalwarts. But on the basis of issue #7, I'll definitely backtrack.
While not every story sticks the landing — a few cauterize their endings prematurely in lieu of a satisfying conclusion, in the belief that readers will tolerate a vignette masquerading as a tale — there are no outright clunkers in this collection. And the majority of these stories display an enviable command of craft and a restless, infinitely cerebral creativity across a spectrum of tones and styles and social milieus, with a particular heart for the culturally disadvantaged.
Here are my notes on my favorites.
“The Trunk,” Jason Allison
“Leo Rosser, thirty-six, covered in p*ss from at least two sources and locked in his own trunk in an effort to keep his spiraling life from flaming out entirely, had hit bottom.”
If I were a literary agent and that was the pitch of the author sitting across from me at a speed-pitching session, I’d say, “Tell me more.” And Jason Allison, New York cop and pretty good writer, does, and does a good job of escalating the crazy in Leo Rosser’s drug-addled head while keeping it tethered to a universally relatable character motive: “I may be a dirtbag, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love my wife and child, and if taking a bath in someone else’s urine is what I have to do to keep them in my miserable life, so be it.”
Every passage and every page is tied to that most irresistible reader’s hook: “How on earth is he going to get out of this mess?”
*****
“Big Daddy,” Rusty Barnes
“Stacy had seen it all, but even the laundered sheets and towels that came in off the truck every morning in six-foot tall blue plastic bins had the stink of Big Daddy on them. He controlled nearly everything that involved money or illegal trade in the Poconos, from the shores of Lake Wallenpaupack to the streets of East Stroudsburg, to the city and back.”
Again, if I were a literary agent listening to a pitch like this, I’d definitely ask for more. I’ve read Rusty Barnes’ stories for years, and if there’s one thing I feel I know about his work, it’s his bottomless heart for those at the bottom of the food chain, whether by choice or circumstance or some combination of both. He knows the specificity of their struggles in a way many of us should, if we don’t already, and as such he is a literate and necessary tour guide to hell. The everyday hell loved by people who clean rooms in second-rate resorts in second-rate destinations. And the hell they’ll go through to get ahead, even a little: “Stacy sat with a hyperventilating Sylvia, soothing her with chicken nuggets she didn’t want and a bottle she did, even at three years old. Through it all, Stacy kept her mind off what she’d done with a bump of cocaine.” This is the real America, and I’m glad we have people like Rusty Barnes around to remind us that we don’t have the right to pretend they don’t exist.
*****
“Looking For Mishka,” Jim Guigli
“He didn’t quit the Berkeley PD to solve missing pet cases—especially for free. Bart everyone detective. He remembered a Lew Archer story, Find the Woman. He read a lot of detective fiction in his office to pass the time. He had a lot of time to pass. But as far as Bart knew, no one had written a private eye story called Find the Cat.”
As soon as you read a line like that, you’re hooked — because you know any author worth their salt will make sure that that is a story that’s about a lot more than a lost cat. If nothing else, a lost private detective, and who doesn’t love a knight-errant in existential torment? This story is slight, and I’m not sure it should have stopped where it did, but I appreciated a private-story story stripped of the usual clichés and tropes.
*****
“Drying Out,” Nils Gilbertson
“I was about a week into a bender that consisted of plastic-bottle gin, YouTube videos of serial killer interviews, and Wheel of Fortune.”
An interesting fever-dreamy account of an alcoholic whose efforts to detox cause him to lose his grasp on reality. Or was it that he couldn’t? Kind of a darkly comic Stephen King tale.
*****
“Negative Tilt,” Bobby Mathews
What a great premise: a journalist’s skills are repurposed for skip-tracing and vehicle-repossession work — and he finds he’s got a knack for this legal dark art. That’s an inventive scenario, fleshed out by an impressively authoritative grasp of the job’s details, that resonates with this laid-off journalist who’s still looking to repurpose his skills in financially comforting fashion. And I love the late twist — who’s more vulnerable to having their car repossessed than a newspaper journalist who’s had their pay repeatedly slashed? What will you do when the name on the repo sheet is someone you know and like?
*****
“The Two of Us Are Going to Have a Problem,” Daniel Vsalaty
I like the execution as much as the premise: an experienced holdup man takes along an untested associate, who kills a woman during the crime. Now the two of them are holed up in a dumpy motel room, waiting to see if one or both of them will have to pay the ultimate price from their employer. This story had me firmly on the hook till the final sentence.
*****
“One Last Round,” James Lilley
Boxing and hardboiled crime fiction go hand in gloved hand, given that few fights in this fictional world seem to be fair, and somebody’s always being played for a sucker, and seemingly everybody connected to the sport would just as soon cut open your throat as cut open your eye. Plus, who doesn’t love the dark streets and blind alleys and dumpy bars that surround every boxing gym, along with the hustlers and losers and minor-league mobsters who seem to sleepwalk there? Not to mention dialogue like this? “Kid, listen. I been in the game a long time. I been screwed, used, chewed up, and spat out. I know how it works. You tell Mags to get me a fight and I’ll put down this glass and put on the gloves. Until then, I’ll see ya round.”
*****
“Eleven months was enough to teach him he couldn’t do five years.”
“Since the first surgery, that’d been another bonus: nobody f***ed with him. Nobody talked to him. He was jaundiced from hepatitis he hadn’t known he had, bloated up by meds, and moving like half his body had rigor mortis. He looked like death.”
More vignette than story, but this outing by Chris Harding Thornton, whose debut novel PICKARD COUNTY ATLAS is one of my favorites of recent years, is a restless original that make you wonder until the last passage how things could possibly play out for the hapless protagonist, a man who went to prison on a cruelly conflated domestic complaint and survived — if you can call it that — by spending most of his time in the prison hospital as a surgical guinea pig. What future can a man like that have outside that environment?
*****
“The Border,” Gregory J. Wolos
“Would there be a border patrol that shot first and asked questions later? He sneaked a look at Mindy. She had picked him, something no woman had ever done before. Though they weren’t pirates, they shared something. They were pioneers of modern survival. Leonard had been rejected as a sperm donor, but Mindy had given him a new purpose: she was an incubator in need—an entrepreneurial incubator—and he was a deliverer.”
I’m maybe more knocked out by the wild inventiveness of this premise than its smoothly superb execution: A cheerfully deranged pregnant woman kidnaps a veterinarian-turned-children’s book author to take her to get her through the border to Mexico, to sell her surrogate baby, and they form a weird not-quite bond along the way.
You could ask me to list a hundred thousand story ideas and I probably wouldn’t have come close to that one. It’s so deliciously crazypants that the reader would be crazy to not want — no, need — to know how this will end. That’s the dictionary definition of a powerhouse hook.
There are a lot of stories here, and in the universe, that end on an abrupt and ambiguous note. Many of them are not as effective, clever or satisfying as I imagine the author imagines them to be. But this one earns its excruciating final sentences, and points the way to lesser writers as to how it should be done.
*****
“The Blue Light Nirvana,” Christopher Witty
“Kicking back against the daydream, the weed had given me the clarity I needed to see, irrefutably, that there was no way of raising six thousand dollars in three days.:
An effective outing for a shopworn premise — the halfway decent man dragged down by his stubborn loyalty to his childhood friends, even when those friends can’t help but make things worse for him in their present degenerative state. It’s the raw material that lifted Dennis Lehane, among others, to literary superstardom. (Look for the homage to “The Pope of Greenwich Village,” a filmed story with the same theme, as well as “Pulp Fiction.”)
This works here, in part because the protagonist loses his own underpinning, and soon his needs and those of his unreliable friends become one and the same. As Bacuda, the main character, notes: “You don’t always need friends. Just people desperate enough to help.”
*****
“Old Man River,” Mark Rapacz
“Jon was known as the ‘Spreadsheets Guy’ at work, but this current project was next level. Conditional formatting, auto-sorting, every shade of color available in the palette dropdown. And formulas. Hundreds, at least. All of which spat out tables and information, which led him to start incorporating real-time analytics of traffic patterns in places like Montreal around the St. Lawrence River and the Danube in Vienna. He compared the commuter behaviors of Sao Paulo to Kiev. He spent an entire week translating municipal data from Indonesia specifically in and near the floating markets of the Martapura Rivers. Traffic congestion in a river—that had to mean huge body counts. Every variable Jon could think of, he put in the spreadsheet, tabulated the contingencies, followed the vectors, compared numbers, created pivot charts, and narrowed in on the finer details of local conditionals, such as the swimming habits of individuals native to tropical rivers to those of northern rivers. The size and flow rate around area dams. And, of course, ice floes. The entire field of research. Freezing patterns, lack of patterns. How pollution affects water temperature and rates of crystallization. He looked at vegetation and invasive species, which kind of underwater bramble could snag a body; hell, could trap a semi. There was a weekend where Jon looked at the erosion pattern of river valleys only in regions of mid-plate tectonic activity. Fascinating stuff. It all went in the spreadsheet.
“His work began to suffer.”
This one may be the most disturbingly inventive story of the lot, a compelling slow-motion traffic accident view of a man slowly sliding into the mortality of his own inaccessible obsession. It made me skin crawl with every passage, and filled me with sadness for its tragic inevitability, and to me that means that this story cleared the high bar it set for itself. Some writers can go all the way down the rabbit hole of madness and still find their way out, and they deserve to be celebrated for walking to the far side of this high wire in a high wind with classic control and restless style. Well done, Mr. Rapacz.
While not every story sticks the landing — a few cauterize their endings prematurely in lieu of a satisfying conclusion, in the belief that readers will tolerate a vignette masquerading as a tale — there are no outright clunkers in this collection. And the majority of these stories display an enviable command of craft and a restless, infinitely cerebral creativity across a spectrum of tones and styles and social milieus, with a particular heart for the culturally disadvantaged.
Here are my notes on my favorites.
“The Trunk,” Jason Allison
“Leo Rosser, thirty-six, covered in p*ss from at least two sources and locked in his own trunk in an effort to keep his spiraling life from flaming out entirely, had hit bottom.”
If I were a literary agent and that was the pitch of the author sitting across from me at a speed-pitching session, I’d say, “Tell me more.” And Jason Allison, New York cop and pretty good writer, does, and does a good job of escalating the crazy in Leo Rosser’s drug-addled head while keeping it tethered to a universally relatable character motive: “I may be a dirtbag, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love my wife and child, and if taking a bath in someone else’s urine is what I have to do to keep them in my miserable life, so be it.”
Every passage and every page is tied to that most irresistible reader’s hook: “How on earth is he going to get out of this mess?”
*****
“Big Daddy,” Rusty Barnes
“Stacy had seen it all, but even the laundered sheets and towels that came in off the truck every morning in six-foot tall blue plastic bins had the stink of Big Daddy on them. He controlled nearly everything that involved money or illegal trade in the Poconos, from the shores of Lake Wallenpaupack to the streets of East Stroudsburg, to the city and back.”
Again, if I were a literary agent listening to a pitch like this, I’d definitely ask for more. I’ve read Rusty Barnes’ stories for years, and if there’s one thing I feel I know about his work, it’s his bottomless heart for those at the bottom of the food chain, whether by choice or circumstance or some combination of both. He knows the specificity of their struggles in a way many of us should, if we don’t already, and as such he is a literate and necessary tour guide to hell. The everyday hell loved by people who clean rooms in second-rate resorts in second-rate destinations. And the hell they’ll go through to get ahead, even a little: “Stacy sat with a hyperventilating Sylvia, soothing her with chicken nuggets she didn’t want and a bottle she did, even at three years old. Through it all, Stacy kept her mind off what she’d done with a bump of cocaine.” This is the real America, and I’m glad we have people like Rusty Barnes around to remind us that we don’t have the right to pretend they don’t exist.
*****
“Looking For Mishka,” Jim Guigli
“He didn’t quit the Berkeley PD to solve missing pet cases—especially for free. Bart everyone detective. He remembered a Lew Archer story, Find the Woman. He read a lot of detective fiction in his office to pass the time. He had a lot of time to pass. But as far as Bart knew, no one had written a private eye story called Find the Cat.”
As soon as you read a line like that, you’re hooked — because you know any author worth their salt will make sure that that is a story that’s about a lot more than a lost cat. If nothing else, a lost private detective, and who doesn’t love a knight-errant in existential torment? This story is slight, and I’m not sure it should have stopped where it did, but I appreciated a private-story story stripped of the usual clichés and tropes.
*****
“Drying Out,” Nils Gilbertson
“I was about a week into a bender that consisted of plastic-bottle gin, YouTube videos of serial killer interviews, and Wheel of Fortune.”
An interesting fever-dreamy account of an alcoholic whose efforts to detox cause him to lose his grasp on reality. Or was it that he couldn’t? Kind of a darkly comic Stephen King tale.
*****
“Negative Tilt,” Bobby Mathews
What a great premise: a journalist’s skills are repurposed for skip-tracing and vehicle-repossession work — and he finds he’s got a knack for this legal dark art. That’s an inventive scenario, fleshed out by an impressively authoritative grasp of the job’s details, that resonates with this laid-off journalist who’s still looking to repurpose his skills in financially comforting fashion. And I love the late twist — who’s more vulnerable to having their car repossessed than a newspaper journalist who’s had their pay repeatedly slashed? What will you do when the name on the repo sheet is someone you know and like?
*****
“The Two of Us Are Going to Have a Problem,” Daniel Vsalaty
I like the execution as much as the premise: an experienced holdup man takes along an untested associate, who kills a woman during the crime. Now the two of them are holed up in a dumpy motel room, waiting to see if one or both of them will have to pay the ultimate price from their employer. This story had me firmly on the hook till the final sentence.
*****
“One Last Round,” James Lilley
Boxing and hardboiled crime fiction go hand in gloved hand, given that few fights in this fictional world seem to be fair, and somebody’s always being played for a sucker, and seemingly everybody connected to the sport would just as soon cut open your throat as cut open your eye. Plus, who doesn’t love the dark streets and blind alleys and dumpy bars that surround every boxing gym, along with the hustlers and losers and minor-league mobsters who seem to sleepwalk there? Not to mention dialogue like this? “Kid, listen. I been in the game a long time. I been screwed, used, chewed up, and spat out. I know how it works. You tell Mags to get me a fight and I’ll put down this glass and put on the gloves. Until then, I’ll see ya round.”
*****
“Eleven months was enough to teach him he couldn’t do five years.”
“Since the first surgery, that’d been another bonus: nobody f***ed with him. Nobody talked to him. He was jaundiced from hepatitis he hadn’t known he had, bloated up by meds, and moving like half his body had rigor mortis. He looked like death.”
More vignette than story, but this outing by Chris Harding Thornton, whose debut novel PICKARD COUNTY ATLAS is one of my favorites of recent years, is a restless original that make you wonder until the last passage how things could possibly play out for the hapless protagonist, a man who went to prison on a cruelly conflated domestic complaint and survived — if you can call it that — by spending most of his time in the prison hospital as a surgical guinea pig. What future can a man like that have outside that environment?
*****
“The Border,” Gregory J. Wolos
“Would there be a border patrol that shot first and asked questions later? He sneaked a look at Mindy. She had picked him, something no woman had ever done before. Though they weren’t pirates, they shared something. They were pioneers of modern survival. Leonard had been rejected as a sperm donor, but Mindy had given him a new purpose: she was an incubator in need—an entrepreneurial incubator—and he was a deliverer.”
I’m maybe more knocked out by the wild inventiveness of this premise than its smoothly superb execution: A cheerfully deranged pregnant woman kidnaps a veterinarian-turned-children’s book author to take her to get her through the border to Mexico, to sell her surrogate baby, and they form a weird not-quite bond along the way.
You could ask me to list a hundred thousand story ideas and I probably wouldn’t have come close to that one. It’s so deliciously crazypants that the reader would be crazy to not want — no, need — to know how this will end. That’s the dictionary definition of a powerhouse hook.
There are a lot of stories here, and in the universe, that end on an abrupt and ambiguous note. Many of them are not as effective, clever or satisfying as I imagine the author imagines them to be. But this one earns its excruciating final sentences, and points the way to lesser writers as to how it should be done.
*****
“The Blue Light Nirvana,” Christopher Witty
“Kicking back against the daydream, the weed had given me the clarity I needed to see, irrefutably, that there was no way of raising six thousand dollars in three days.:
An effective outing for a shopworn premise — the halfway decent man dragged down by his stubborn loyalty to his childhood friends, even when those friends can’t help but make things worse for him in their present degenerative state. It’s the raw material that lifted Dennis Lehane, among others, to literary superstardom. (Look for the homage to “The Pope of Greenwich Village,” a filmed story with the same theme, as well as “Pulp Fiction.”)
This works here, in part because the protagonist loses his own underpinning, and soon his needs and those of his unreliable friends become one and the same. As Bacuda, the main character, notes: “You don’t always need friends. Just people desperate enough to help.”
*****
“Old Man River,” Mark Rapacz
“Jon was known as the ‘Spreadsheets Guy’ at work, but this current project was next level. Conditional formatting, auto-sorting, every shade of color available in the palette dropdown. And formulas. Hundreds, at least. All of which spat out tables and information, which led him to start incorporating real-time analytics of traffic patterns in places like Montreal around the St. Lawrence River and the Danube in Vienna. He compared the commuter behaviors of Sao Paulo to Kiev. He spent an entire week translating municipal data from Indonesia specifically in and near the floating markets of the Martapura Rivers. Traffic congestion in a river—that had to mean huge body counts. Every variable Jon could think of, he put in the spreadsheet, tabulated the contingencies, followed the vectors, compared numbers, created pivot charts, and narrowed in on the finer details of local conditionals, such as the swimming habits of individuals native to tropical rivers to those of northern rivers. The size and flow rate around area dams. And, of course, ice floes. The entire field of research. Freezing patterns, lack of patterns. How pollution affects water temperature and rates of crystallization. He looked at vegetation and invasive species, which kind of underwater bramble could snag a body; hell, could trap a semi. There was a weekend where Jon looked at the erosion pattern of river valleys only in regions of mid-plate tectonic activity. Fascinating stuff. It all went in the spreadsheet.
“His work began to suffer.”
This one may be the most disturbingly inventive story of the lot, a compelling slow-motion traffic accident view of a man slowly sliding into the mortality of his own inaccessible obsession. It made me skin crawl with every passage, and filled me with sadness for its tragic inevitability, and to me that means that this story cleared the high bar it set for itself. Some writers can go all the way down the rabbit hole of madness and still find their way out, and they deserve to be celebrated for walking to the far side of this high wire in a high wind with classic control and restless style. Well done, Mr. Rapacz.
May 20, 2022
An excellent collection of criminal misdeeds. I enjoyed the entire collection but the standouts included stories by Jason Allison, Jim Guigli, James McCrone, Ali Seay, Rob D. Smith, Christopher Witty. Really looking forward to the next instalment.
December 24, 2022
From ride or die friends in Rob D. Smith's As Long As You Look Faraway to Mark Rapacz's Old Man River and to Bobby Matthews's Negative Tilt, there is a lot to love in the issue of Rock and a Hard Place. Take Rusty Barnes's take on the evil of Big Daddy's. In the end, everyone must pay. Or Ali Seay's Enthusiasm, which is just the right kind of darkness for this particular Canadian. Did I dig them all? Not quite, but that's par for the course in situations such as these. Anyway: Go forth, seek out, purchase and enjoy. Tell 'em another lover of a solid round of fiction sent you.
March 1, 2022
Wonderful collection of noir tales about bad decisions!
May 22, 2022
I really liked this anthology. I had never heard of any of the authors, and was very surprised that I enjoyed almost every story. 17 noir stories about crimes and bad decisions. Also 7 photographs from different artists. Excited to see what rock and a hard place press does next, and to explore the earlier volumes.
Jason Allison - The Trunk ⭐⭐⭐
Rusty Barnes - Big Daddy ⭐⭐⭐
Jim Guigli - Looking for Mishka ⭐⭐
Estelle Phillips - Tenderness ⭐⭐⭐
James McCrone - Ultimatum Games ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Nils Gilbertson - Drying Out ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Bobby Mathews - Negative Tilt ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Ali Seay - Enthusiasm ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Daniel Vlasaty - The Two of Us Are Going to Have a Problem ⭐⭐⭐⭐
J. Rohr - Damned If You Do ⭐⭐
Rob D. Smith - As Long As You Look Faraway ⭐⭐⭐⭐
James Lilley - One Last Round ⭐⭐
Chris Harding Thornton - Dead Man's Cocktail ⭐⭐⭐
Gregory Wolos - The Border ⭐⭐
Christopher Witty - The Blue Light Nirvana ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Mike Zimmerman - Metabolize to Freedom ⭐⭐
Mark Rapacz - Old Man River ⭐⭐
Jason Allison - The Trunk ⭐⭐⭐
Rusty Barnes - Big Daddy ⭐⭐⭐
Jim Guigli - Looking for Mishka ⭐⭐
Estelle Phillips - Tenderness ⭐⭐⭐
James McCrone - Ultimatum Games ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Nils Gilbertson - Drying Out ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Bobby Mathews - Negative Tilt ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Ali Seay - Enthusiasm ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Daniel Vlasaty - The Two of Us Are Going to Have a Problem ⭐⭐⭐⭐
J. Rohr - Damned If You Do ⭐⭐
Rob D. Smith - As Long As You Look Faraway ⭐⭐⭐⭐
James Lilley - One Last Round ⭐⭐
Chris Harding Thornton - Dead Man's Cocktail ⭐⭐⭐
Gregory Wolos - The Border ⭐⭐
Christopher Witty - The Blue Light Nirvana ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Mike Zimmerman - Metabolize to Freedom ⭐⭐
Mark Rapacz - Old Man River ⭐⭐
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews