“The Mindfulness of Horror Practice” utilizes the imperative mood written in a hypnotic cadence. “The Indoor Swamp” takes on the rare second person perspective. The story “20 Steps to Ventriloquism” reads as an instruction manual. The story structures themselves lend to this piercing view of humanity as Padgett often dispenses with the traditional first/third person linear narrative. From the first story, Padgett displays a wonderful imagination for human pathology and self-destructive compulsions. The examination of our nature is not the virtuous and noble fabling ( coming of age, self-sacrifice, etc) of what we want ourselves to be, but a penetrating look at man as that morally obliquitous, phenomenally ungrateful biped of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. The Secret of Ventriloquism amplifies the surreal and weird to provide not a picture of man, but an x-ray. Jon Padgett’s The Secret of Ventriloquism (Dunhams Manor Press) hits the same nerve as the HBO mini-series Westworld as in its introspective core it asks the basic existential question: what, precisely, is it to be human?
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