The Secret of Ventriloquism is Padgett’s first collection of short stories, and already he has carved himself a niche in the world of weird horror. Jon Padgett is not only a fantastic writer who’s been published in The Lovecraft eZine and Psuedopod, with many, many more sales under his belt, he’s also an amazing narrator (check out the audiobook of this collection!) who runs Grimscribe, which publishes Vastarien: A Literary Journal. We will want nothing but for our strings to be cut. And sooner or later, we will want nothing but for that exorcism, that expulsion from the house we once thought as home. Ghosts moaning through the long, empty corridors of this castle of flesh. It’s a way of realising that we are unwanted guests in these bodies of ours. Jon Padgett’s The Secret of Ventriloquism is a fast-track course in realising the one thing we all come to realise eventually, whether or not we look into the mirror. If you’ve gotten this far, then you might just make it as a Lesser Ventriloquist. Look at them now! How those strange strings thicken and lengthen, wrap themselves around the frail bones of your hand, squirming under the flesh. And when you look hard enough, you can follow it from your head to your neck, and then to your hands. Little threads of red leading into the back of your eye. Into it so far that you, like Alice trembling before the rabbit hole, teeter on the edge of all that you know, and just as you want to look away, you see what you were looking for all along. By you ever looked into the mirror for too long? Not at a mirror, you understand.
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