Jon Padgett
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5″ x 8″, 250 pgs.
Trade Hardcover, SIGNED BY AUTHOR, Case Laminate (70 lbs paper) – $50 USD
(Shipping and handling included worldwide, regardless of destination)
5″ x 8″, 250 pgs.
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4.25″ x 7″, 342 pgs.
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Synopsis
Jon Padgett’s acclaimed collection/hybrid novel, The Secret of Ventriloquism, named the Best Fiction Book by Rue Morgue Magazine, now returns in an expanded edition of the original, with three new stories. The book features Dave Felton’s iconic cover art and frontispiece as well as a Foreword by the legendary Thomas Ligotti.
With themes reminiscent of Shirley Jackson, 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 paranoid flyer’s worst fears are realized in a way not even he could imagine. 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. A job-fatigued woman seeks out an invisible, identity-blasting hole of alluvium from her past. A spirit of homelessness plans its escape to a possibly mythical mountain. A fog-soaked city heaves its dying breath. And a presence speaks through them all.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Thomas Ligotti
Introduction by Matt Cardin
The Mindfulness of Horror Practice
Murmurs of a Voice Foreknown
The Indoor Swamp
Origami Dreams
20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism
Flight 389
The Infusorium
Organ Void
The Secret of Ventriloquism
A Little Delta of Filth
Escape to Thin Mountain
The Secret Society of Dummies
About the Author
Jon Padgett is a professional–though lapsed–ventriloquist who lives in New Orleans. He is the Editor-In-Chief of Grimscribe Press, which publishes Vastarien: A Literary Journal, a source of critical study and creative response to the work of Thomas Ligotti. Padgett’s first short story collection, The Secret of Ventriloquism, was named the Best Fiction Book of the Year by Rue Morgue Magazine.
Padgett’s voice has also become synonymous with the works of Thomas Ligotti. Padgett has lent his voice to numerous Thomas Ligotti works, including the recently released Penguin Random House audio version of Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe and various Cadabra Record releases, “The Bungalow House,” “The Red Tower,” “The Small People,” “Gas Station Carnivals,” “The Clown Puppet,” “Pictures of Apocalypse,” and “Mrs. Rinaldi’s Angel.” In addition to his work as a Ligotti narrator, Padgett has also narrated two Cadabra Records releases of his own work, “20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism” and “Origami Dreams.” With his ability to channel Ligotti’s prose and poetry via the spoken word, Padgett is a singular figure in the world of weird storytelling.
Praise
“’20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism’ [the pivotal story within The Secret of Ventriloquism] is what might be deemed an ultimate horror vision. What makes such a piece always resides in an ambition to transcend literature itself. As purely a matter of literary taxonomy, I would place this magnificently executed short story in a class with Lovecraft’s ‘Call of Cthulhu, ‘ Blackwood’s ‘The Willows, ‘ and Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘The Lottery in Babylon.’ These are tales that lead one to say, ‘This is a revelation of how things are.’ Like them, ’20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism’ pulls out all the stops to convey a towering perspective that encompasses and reveals the essence of existence. That is its scope. That is how it affects those exposed to the story. When it comes to a close, one’s reaction is, ‘There is nothing more to be said.’ And, of course, what has been spoken by ’20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism’ is by necessity deftly strange and awful, like life itself once its façade has been peeled away little by little. That is how an ultimate horror vision works its wonder.”
-Thomas Ligotti, author of Noctuary & The Spectral Link
“The Secret of Ventriloquism is horror with a capital H. Some of Padgett’s lines raised the hair on my neck. The stories radiate darkness… In a year of exceptional weird fiction, this is a mattock-handle-wrapped-in-barbed-wire heavy hitter.”
-Laird Barron, author of Swift to Chase
“Padgett proves with his stunning debut collection to be a worthy successor to Thomas Ligotti. There’s no gristle, no bone, no dilly-dallying here: only pure meat whose terrors seamlessly grow into the metaphysical. This volume is jam-packed with the stuff that nightmares are made of.”
-Dejan Ognjanovic, Rue Morgue Magazine
“Jon Padgett’s The Secret of Ventriloquism is a horror revelation. The interconnected short stories are ghastly, clever, dryly witty, but also 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.”
-Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World
“There’s quite enough variety of tone, setting, and focus here to surprise and disconcert any reader, and leave preconceived expectations flopping and gasping in the cold black mud of Padgett’s imagination…Padgett is a chilling master in his own right.”
-Paul StJohn Mackintosh, Teleread
“Jon Padgett… satisfied ALL of my wants and needs as a reader of dark and weird fiction. These stories… are as utterly satisfying as short fiction can be.”
-Charlene Cocrane, Horror After Dark
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