Powerhouse-author and thinker, David Peak, interviewed me for FANZINE. This took months to complete, and I'm delighted with the results. Many thanks to David for his incredible questions and patience.

Black Fog: An Interview with Jon Padgett

Here's the intro:

Jon Padgett’s debut collection, The Secret of Ventriloquism, was released by Dunhams Manor in late 2016, and enjoyed instant success among readers of the horrific and the weird. Padgett’s work is relentlessly creepy, exploring themes of altered realities, human simulacra, and occult conspiracy, among others. Perhaps most impressive, though, is Padgett’s ability to elevate these concerns above the usual fray of the genre, subsequently tapping into the utter strangeness of the things that lie in wait beneath the world. As the founder and longtime operator of Thomas Ligotti Online, perhaps the web’s most significant hub for the weird minded, the publication of TSoV was something of an event, selling out its initial run in hardcover, and finding additional and well-deserved success as a destined-to-be-classic audiobook.

Like Schulz’s Street of Crocodiles, Ligotti’s first collection, Songs of a Dread Dreamer, or Laird Barron’s recent Swift to Chase, the whole of Padgett’s book is greater than the sum of its parts. The stories often overlap or recall one another in unexpected ways. Reading a collection from cover to cover is perhaps the litmus test for whether or not it “works,” whether or not it coheres into something with vision and voice, and where so many other collections fail, Padgett’s succeeds. This success is even more impressive once you take into consideration how fully developed and unique each individual story is. Take “Organ Void,” for instance, which seamlessly blends a Ballardian fixation on concrete overpasses and urban sprawl with “junk-sick” body horror; or “Murmurs of a Voice Foreknown,” a coming-of-age story about cruelty and the bonds of brotherhood that settles on delicate and unnerving truths; or the collection’s centerpiece, “20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism,” a sublime meditation on being with a capital “B” and the illusion of human agency.

Finally, it’s worth noting that this interview was conducted via email over the course of several months. Devising the questions and waiting for answers sometimes took weeks. I believe that this is indicative of the care and attention to detail that Jon puts into his work.