A great and unprolific author of supernatural horror fiction, T. E. D. Klein, once enumerated how many stories one must produce to secure a place among the masters of the genre, one who will be read in anthologies and whose books will be around for the foreseeable future. According to Klein, the number of needed to attain such a status: one. To test this assertion, we need only ask the ghosts of such memorable figures as W. W. Jacobs (“The Monkey’s Paw”) and Jerome Bixby (“It’s a Good Life”). In the history of the literature in question, to make this single mark may be the beginning and end of one’s contribution, as with Jacobs and Bixby. However, it could also serve as a milestone or point of orientation to a writer’s other works. Reasonable examples of this kind of story may include Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” and H. P. Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu.” To this list could be added Jon Padgett’s “20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism.”

In the view of Jorge Luis Borges, the number of a story writer’s notable achievements, however large the final count, can be reduced to about a half dozen. On the whole, this seems a fair and accurate estimate. Unprolific as Klein was as a short fiction writer, he made an admirable approach to Borges’s measure, which is more a matter of quality than quantity. In my view, the same can be said of Padgett, whose THE SECRET OF VENTRILOQUISM impresses one as a selection of best works more than a volume of collected works to date. A glance at the table of contents alone stimulates the imagination of those familiar with “20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism,” the focus but not by necessity the summation of his repute, justly arousing the expectation of pleasures from reading or reading again such stories as “Murmurs of a Voice Foreknown,” “The Indoor Swamp,” and “The Infusorium.”
--Thomas Ligotti