The Secret of Ventriloquism by Jon Padgett

The third story, ‘Origami Dreams’ serves up sorrow and disturbance in equal measure as a hidden manuscript from under a piece of furniture in the protagonist’s home provides answers to unknown questions and leaves the reader with a hollow sense of despair. ‘The Indoor Swamp’ follows with a description of the theme park attraction that no-one would ever want to visit, but which, in the story, is described as an unavoidable, inescapable place. As the story progresses, the knots in the reader’s stomach grow tighter until it reaches its resolution. The collection’s first story, ‘Murmurs of a Voice Forknown,’ is one of childhood bullying and humiliation, capturing the sense of being the put-upon younger brother aptly. While the stories do not all involve ventriloquism per se, as the introduction by Matt Cardin ( Dark Awakenings) implies, this voice of the ventriloquist somehow permeates each of them. As a former ventriloquist himself, the theme seems an apt one for the author to weave his strange worlds around. Sandwiched in the middle of all that is a wholly disturbing, twenty-step guide to advanced ventriloquism. Starting with a guided meditation to prepare the reader to fully experience the horrors to follow, Jon Padgett presents six works of short, weird fiction, with the emphasis on the weird.

If The Secret of Ventriloquism were to be summed up in a single word, that word would have to be ‘unsettling’. “For those who enjoy fiction of a weird nature with a capital ‘w’ The Secret of Ventriloquism should not be missed.”

The Secret of Ventriloquism by Jon Padgett