There are too the more classically structured horror tales as represented by the terrifically stylish ‘The Infusorium’ and (one of my favorites) the mind-bendy ‘Origami Dreams’. Much like a ventriloquist using his dummy’s flapping lips and blinking eyes to misdirect the audience, so do these non-traditional story forms allow the dread and uncanny to worm into the consciousness as if it were always there, always a part of us. The titular ‘The Secret of Ventriloquism’ is structured as a play replete with a scrawl of stage notes. It really could be a suggestive speech delivered by some wicked, pernicious hypnotist.

‘The Mindfulness of Horror Practice’ utilizes an imperative mood written in a mesmeric cadence. ‘The Indoor Swamp’ takes on the rare second person perspective, effectively immersing the reader in that fetid muck pool he so gracefully describes. The story ’20 Steps to Ventriloquism’ reads as an instruction manual.

The individual story structures themselves lend to this piercing view of humanity as mostly Padgett dispenses with the traditional first/third person linear narrative. From the first story, Padgett displays a wonderful imagination for man’s obsessive pathologies and his near endless self-destructive compulsions. This deep examination of our nature is not the virtuous, noble meta-fabling of many other books (the coming of age/self-sacrifice/Cinderella tropes) of what we want ourselves to be, but a penetrating look at man as that morally obliquitous, phenomenally ungrateful biped of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. Named the Best Fiction Book of 2016 by Rue Morgue Magazine, The Secret of Ventriloquism amplifies the surreal and weird to provide not a hi-def picture of man, but an x-ray. Jon Padg ett’s The Secret of Ventriloquism (Dunhams Manor Press) hits the same sweet spot as the HBO mini-series, Westworld, in that, at its introspective core, it asks the basic question of man: What, precisely, is it to be human?

The secret of ventriloquism