Jon Padgett
Author. Narrator. Editor.
The Secret Is Out.
Jon Padgett’s acclaimed collection/hybrid novel The Secret of Ventriloquism, with editions translated into three languages and named the Best Fiction Book of the Year by Rue Morgue Magazine, returns in a new expanded edition featuring three new stories and a foreword by the legendary Thomas Ligotti.
With themes reminiscent of Shirley Jackson, Thomas Ligotti, and Bruno Schulz, but with a strikingly unique vision, Padgett’s work explores the mystery of human suffering, the agony of personal existence, and the ghastly means by which someone might achieve salvation from both. A bullied child seeks vengeance within a bed’s hollow box spring. A lucid dreamer is haunted by an impossible house. A dummy reveals its own anatomy in 20 simple steps. A stuttering librarian holds the key to a mill town’s unspeakable secrets. A commuter’s worldview is shattered by two words printed on a cardboard sign. An aspiring ventriloquist spends a little too much time looking at himself in a mirror. And a presence speaks through them all.
Praise
“In the view of Jorge Luis Borges, the number of a story writer’s notable achievements, however large the final count, can be reduced to about a half dozen. On the whole, this seems a fair and accurate estimate. Unprolific as Klein was as a short fiction writer, he made an admirable approach to Borges’s measure, which is more a matter of quality than quantity. In my view, the same can be said of Padgett, whose The Secret of Ventriloquism impresses one as a selection of the best works more than a volume of collected works to date.“
“The Secret of Ventriloquism is horror with a capital H… a mattock-handle-wrapped-in-barbed-wire heavy hitter.”
“A horror revelation… genuinely and bone-rattlingly creepy and disturbing. Sure, going in, I was already afraid of ventriloquist dummies, but now I’m deathly afraid of Jon Padgett.”
“Padgett proves with his stunning debut collection to be a worthy successor to Thomas Ligotti… This volume is jam-packed with the stuff that nightmares are made of.”
The Lapsed Ventriloquist.
Jon Padgett is an author, narrator, and the Editor-in-Chief of Grimscribe Press. His work, rooted in his background as a professional—though lapsed—ventriloquist, explores the uncanny nature of consciousness and the unsettling philosophy of “Greater Ventriloquism.” A singular figure in the world of weird storytelling, his voice has become synonymous with the works of Thomas Ligotti, and his own award-winning fiction has been hailed as a ‘horror revelation.’
