"On Paladin Road" by Patti Abbott

Here's irony: of all the blogger friends and pals I've met on my journey, I have not read much of their fiction. And believe me, they have written a lot of fiction. Ya'll know who you are.

Patti Abbott, the head mistress of the fabulously fun Friday's Forgotten Books, has a new story up at A Twist of Noir. It's called "On Paladin Road" and you have to go and take a read at it. You won't be disappointed.

Patti's lamented a few times about the types of stories she writes and the available outlets for said stories. And I think she has a point. There's the hard-edged sites and the soft-edged sites and there's not a great middle ground.

But a story like Patti's is a precious thing. Her prose has a nice, graceful elegance to it, the kind of prose one normally associates with 'literary' writers. As the grandson of a carpenter and the son of a woodworker, I can feel and see the type of workshop Patti describes here: "The steely gleam of sharpened tools, the bouquet composed of oils, wax and freshly cut wood, the familiar pitch of a blade making the first cuts into a good piece of Pennsylvania cherry, were intoxicating." To me, it's the little nuances like this passage that brings a basic story up a notch or two, becoming something else.

Over on her blog the other day, she posed a question "What great movie would you not watch again?" I made my choices (you'll have to jump to her site to see them) and one of the movies I consider very good I'll never watch again merely for the ending. What I'm not saying is that the ending isn't good. It is. It stays with me and everytime I think about the movie, a hole in my stomach opens up.

I got that kind of feeling with the ending of "On Paladin Road." It fits, of course, but it's, it's...well, just go see for yourself.