This is followed by perhaps the most disturbing piece of all in the form of ’Twenty Simple Steps to Ventriloquism.’ Beginning as nothing more than what one might expect, explaining voice throwing techniques, etc, the steps become unfathomably dark as the guide progresses and an entirely new definition of the ventriloquist is established.įollowing on from this is the longest of the collection’s stories, ‘The Infusorium.’ Composed of six chapters and taking the form of a recollection by a female murder detective, Padgett places the story in the location of ‘Origami Dreams,’ using characters from that story, too.

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