The Infusorium by Jon Padgett

The Infusorium Reviews

• 
  Karl

  It states in the biography of Jon Padgett that he is a professional - though lapsed - ventriloquist who lives in New Orleans.
  
  Mr. Padget is the founder and longtime administrator of "Thomas Ligotti Online" (ligotti.net}
  
  The Ligotti influence shows itself in this strange story of a murder investigation falling into the "Twilight Zone" and not quite finding it's way out.
  
  This is the first fiction I have read by Jon Padgett, but it certainly will not be the last. I see where he has a collection of stories scheduled to appear next year (2016) to which I look forward to, and anything else that my arise in the meantime.
  
  Excellent story. Highest praise.
  
  
  This is book number 40 in Dunhams Manor Press publications.
• 
  Michael Sorbello

  I think this was the best story featured within The Secret of Ventriloquism book. A gritty film noir vibe, a vulgar female detective with a grimy past, a backwater mystery with a surreal sense of paranormal undertones and an invasive psychological presence that keeps you guessing. The author has a talent for playing with the reader's mind, just how one would expect a ventriloquist to play with a dummy. Well done.
  
  ***
  
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• 
  The Gehenna Post

  As many readers likely know, if they have ever read Padgett’s work, is that his prose exhibits traits of hallucinatory horror, disturbingly visceral description, and a crisp, meticulous talent for conveying otherworldly concepts within a believable narrative structure. The strange details that he dabbles with could easily cross the border into the fantastical, yet Padgett maintains his hypnotic anchors in our minds with language that transforms his often supernatural stories into episodic nightmares played out along a master puppeteer’s strings. These strings originating in our consciousness, that bade us welcome into his macabre imagination.
  
  The Infusorium is no outlier to the modus operandi in Padgett’s fiction. Following a detective’s investigation into strange, gruesome murders in a murky, pollution-ridden town, the novella’s fast pace and viscerally unsettling imagery transport the readers into a desolate landscape whilst their minds are ravaged with obscene, dream-like events and an intertwining mystery that alludes to a broader conspiracy. As is subsequently evident in his debut short story collection, The Secret of Ventriloquism, Padgett expands his shared universe by including several characters and terminology that appear in his other work, crafting The Infusorium as yet another interchangeable part in his mythos. The sense of a collective world in which all of the author’s works exist makes the novella even more enticing, like putting together pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, or perhaps assembling a doll.
  
  Boasting a strong female lead, which is unfortunately rare in much of modern horror fiction, Padgett immediately sets The Infusorium apart from other works. The eco-aware fictional city of Dunnstown presents a saddening, but not all-too-unbelievable, reality for the characters who reside there, the “paper mill days” a disturbing part of their lives that hits pretty close to home with the advent of pollution and waste that we face in real industrialized cities. The novella’s pace and speedy transitions are preceded by one of the most eye-catching and attention-grasping opening pages in modern horror literature. If the opening lines don’t catch the reader off guard and suck them into Dunnstown along with the acrid air, it’s only because the strings pulling their legs forward have gone unnoticed.
  
  Padgett combines weird fiction, commercial horror, and a dose of noir to concoct a lethal brew of tension that doesn’t go down smoothly, but rather hits you hard and fast. The kind of story that you finish in one sitting, finding yourself wanting more before you’ve even taken your eyes off the final page. As with Padgett’s fiction, the “reason” for many strange phenomena often go unexplained. Whereas some might find this problematic, we find it delicately handled and intricately executed. Padgett understands how reasons, or definitive explanations, can weight a story and dilute the mysticism and ambiguity that make weird fiction such an interesting, imaginative subgenre. He offers enough information in The Infusorium for the readers to develop their own interpretations, while allowing that small space of definition to linger, neither confirming nor denying any notions. Padgett’s language is strange, but haunting, as The Infusorium, from start to finish, feels like a nightmare that the reader just can’t wake up from.
  
  As many have said before, his work echoes Ligotti, but we find the origin of this echo to be an original, enthralling voice that finds no reluctance in dipping into the experimental, and diving headfirst into the peculiar. Ending with an explosive, terrifying finale, The Infusorium will have no trouble transporting the reader into a gloomy, foreboding world while assaulting their imaginations with unnatural body horror, psychologically deranged character motives, and festering an itch to squeeze the back of your arm, just to make sure you haven’t indeed traveled to Dunnstown yourself.
• 
  sologdin

  First person narrator in this police procedural with noir overtones presents us with an undecidability between natural and supernatural explanations of plot events, such as how bizarre things are understood as a “hoax” (12) or through characters “who don’t find anything strange” in manifestly fucked up things (13). Narration is narrator’s testimony to an unidentified interlocutor after a criminal conviction and therefore partakes of the same formal presentation as Nabokov’s Lolita.
  
  Fulfills therefore Todorov’s definition of the fantastic (as reported by Rosemary Jackson in
  Fantasy The Literature of Subversion):

  First, the text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons and to hesitate between a natural and supernatural explanation of the events described. Second, this hesitation may also be experienced by a character; thus the reader’s role is entrusted to a character … the hesitation is represented, it becomes one of the themes of the work. Third, the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text: he will reject allegorical as well as ‘poetic’ interpretations. (loc cit. at 28)

  (By contrast, Todorov’s ‘mimetic’ is realistic representation; the ‘uncanny’ is where weirdnesses are captured as subjective, psychological distortions; and the ‘marvelous’ is where the weird is plainly and uncontrovertibly supernatural.)
  
  Text is pregnant with the liminal: the locus at issue “merged with that part of town in a way, and I’m still not clear where the park ends and where the rest of the city begins” (8), a borderland status of the setting that reiterates. By contrast the outsider status of the protagonist is emphasized (detailed at 9): whatever this place is (as the setting is liminal and thus undecidable, the text is unable to say what sort of place), it is not her place. I’d commented in other reviews of horror texts that, as a genre, modern horror is concerned to some extent with how all that is solid melts into air, a standard conservative lament—if the Old Ways are being abolished, it is like super scary &c. That is an oddity, considering that many practitioners have good lefty bona fides (King, say, Ligotti—author here is also not rightwing; on the other hand: HPL is a fucking fascist). In this text, the free movement of persons (outsider comes to new town, is of a noticeably different ethnicity, “a little too swarthy and, well, Mediterranean for my fellow police” (9)), the second wave of feminism regarding employment and sexuality, the right to divorce, and anti-natalism are the perfect storm for this protagonist to represent the end of the world to a small Alabama town. That is, not so much that the text adopts a far right attitude, like HPL, but rather that text presents the critique that rural troglodytes can imagine no greater horror than the emancipatory potential of the enlightenment project in the fullness of its development (such as in the persons of Simone de Beauvoir and WEB duBois). I’ve got no problem with that; in my not at all humble opinion, rural troglodytes make fine food for monsters generated by the sleep of their own reason.
  
  Liminal setting is moreover marked by “dilapidated” and “defunct” (8). Primary locus involves “closure and abandonment” of industrial production (13). Setting is therefore post-industrial or perhaps even de-industrializing. Thing is (and this is part of the undecidability), setting’s “smoke was due to some kind of lingering, toxic effect of the old factory’s presence” (14), suggesting that deindustrialization does not decrease environmental toxicity—likely this is part of the fantasy (unless the primitivists are just dead wrong). Air pollution itself is rendered as an “aquarium” (16), “underwater quiet” and “brownish murk” (17), snowglobes (18), and so on. If Marx is correct that all that is solid has melted into air, this text steps further with all that is air has coalesced back to liquid. Eww?
  
  Creepy, complicated, worthy of one’s attention. Ties into author’s flawless short fiction “Twenty Simple Steps to Ventriloquism” in
  The Grimscribe’s Puppets to the extent that narrator is at one point subject to the mesmerism of the town sage, who refers to her as “dummy” repeatedly while giving her direction (30-31), plainly invoking the ‘greater ventriloquism’ of the former story.
  
  Visceral horror substitutes in for (and thereby supplements?) modern art in “they were composite pieces of bones welded together by a talented but whacked local artist” (11). Makes use of Jewish mysticism, regarding the kabalistic presentation of qliphoth, which is cool, pregnant, and not overdone. Detective protagonist does appear to uncover a mystery or conspiracy of lovecraftian scope—but narrator’s abject failure otherwise means that Evil wins. Ergo: kickass. And: nice bit of authorial self-denigration in having one character describe something as “appendaged” and then having narrator complain “Who writes like that?” (9).
  
  Recommended for those subject to a series of internal detonations, readers who connect the dots out of sheer boredom, and persons who see through the eyes of a fucking shark.
  
• 
  Donald Armfield

  Screaming skulls during a strange season. Thick fog engulfs a small town from the decaying corpses that linger around. With an investigation of two detectives, but what they know is not believable and seen as an insubordination. This weird tale takes you to the paper mill days of Dunnstown. A must read.
• 
  Clint

  Sinister in its succinctness, Jon Padgett’s chapbook, The Infusorium (Dunhams Manor Press), is a grimily tidy detective story, soot-stained with a supernatural skeletal structure. While artist Dave Felton accurately captures the tale’s uncanny atmosphere with his superb cover illustration, Padgett quickly pulls us into a puzzle, the jagged pieces of which click into place at a satisfying pace.
  
  The first-person narration maintains a tenuous balance between tonal trust and subjective suspicion with the protag’s intent. From the outset, we’re swiftly obliged to demand answers and follow our central speaker into the haze-draped setting of Dunnston, a place Padgett’s protag deftly describes (at numerous points throughout) as a place “subject to thick, putrid fogs that last day and night—paper mills days, they call them when the factories north of town bring the omnipresent smell of farts among us and the city is shrouded in a dark fishbowl haze.”
  
  A film I nostalgically cherish is The Fog (1980)—more for the aesthetic impression it made on me at a young age than anything else—and Padgett descriptively captures so many similarly creepy compositions which recall the visualized disorientation of Carpenter’s film; though, with The Infusorium, the murk lingers.
  
  At its miasmic marrow, The Infusorium is a rhythmic set piece which showcases Padgett’s capabilities as not only a writer of dark fiction and horror, but as an author who knows how to competently build a mystery—bone by bone…ligament by ligament. The Infusorium is a study in sustained unease. My fingers still feel soot-smeared. And, come to think of it, my bones don’t feel so great either.
  
• 
  Paul Ataua

  I thought I’d read ‘The Infusorium’ before deciding whether to go on to read ‘The Secret of Ventriloquism’ collection from where it came. It was certainly original and definitely a little weird, but I really struggled with it. Raph, the detective in this case of the discovery of elongated skeletons in the fog surrounded Municipal Park, never really felt real, and the way in which the author added atmosphere destroying quips for no understandable reason just put me off. And so the book goes back on the shelf until my memory fades and I am again attracted by the unusually titled “The Secret of Ventriloquism’.
• 
  Orrin Grey

  Well, I had planned to parcel out my reading of Jon Padgett's Infusorium, but once I got started I found it hard to stop. There are sequences in this brief chapbook that will stick with me for a long time, and in fog-choked Dunnstown, Padgett has added a distinctive locale to the atlas of weird fiction that I think will endure. While the Ligotti influences here seem obvious, I also noted resemblances to Michael Chabon's "In the Black Mill," in all the best ways.
  
  Skeletons (something I have a particular soft spot for) are all-too-seldom used to good effect in fiction, and here they are used to a particularly brilliant effect, perhaps as well as I've ever seen it done. This is only the second thing I've read by Padgett, following on the heels of his brilliant "20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism," but it shows that he's a weird voice to be reckoned with. I'm looking forward to reading much, much more.
• 
  Alex

  This is what creepypasta wants to be when it grows up. First person narrative that slowly ratchets weirdness and dread, leaving you unsettled after the end.
• 
  John Smith

  The Infusorium combines many elements that make the astute reader of Thomas Ligotti smile, yet Padgett breathes humanity into the elements and this strange tale set in a dense, fog-swathed town in which our narrator, Raphaella Castellano, a female homicide detective, makes bizarre discoveries, including elongated skeletons, that leads her to The Brotherhood of the Black Fog. I enjoyed Castellano’s voice, her perceptions, and the way Padgett keeps adding to the weirdness as the tale goes on. Good stuff, and Padgett has a collection coming out next year, The Secret of Ventriloquism, I’m eagerly looking forward to reading.
  
  Cool, creepy cover art courtesy of Dave Felton.
  
• 
  C.F. Page

  I won’t get onto the plot because of how short this novella is, but it’s essentially True Detective x Thomas Ligotti x The Thing. But the only thing (no pun intended) holding it back from a five star is that a) there are a few too many typos, and—considering how short this story is—there shouldn’t be any; and b) our protagonist isn’t very likable, which I feel has something to do with masculinizing her to justify her being a homicide detective… which actually might be realistic, considering her line of work; but it’s a modern trope that I’m sick too death of.
  
  But. Those two things only knock off one star for me. In cosmic horror—which this sort of is, by way of Ligotti—character doesn’t matter (as much).
  
  I highly recommend giving this a shot if you’re a Lovecraft or Ligotti fan, or a lover of weird fiction.
• 
  Spencer

  To put it simply, this story is amazing! It combines so many aspects that I love in horror fiction; a strange town, unusual characters, a constant and increasing tension to the story, creepy desolate locations and a central mystery running throughout! If you like horror in any way, read this now!
• 
  Amy

  Well hmmmm, I can see the reasons why it can be cosmic horror, but what? I liked the idea of the skeletons, but what? Why were they growing, were they dead? What was the purpose, and what? I couldn’t grasp what was going on it’s like coming into a conversation half way finished on metaphysics. I felt like I missed something that everyone else got. I didn’t care for the main characters, especially Raph, she sounded like a 1950’s detective; “this is how it is see, I didn’t like him see, I’m a tough lady cop see. “ I kept thinking she was a man by the way she spoke and acted. Other than that the idea was great and it was original, I just wished it was executed better.
• 
  Tom Reed

  a unique story in a world/genre where such a thing is hard to find.
• 
  Billy Rubin

  A short novelette about bodies found around an old, sooty and fog surrounded paper mill. Kind of a detective story. Kind of a few things but like the fog, ultimately formless.
  
  Entertaining enough read
• 
  Danny De Maio

  You can find this in Padgett’s first collection, but this story alone is worth the asking price. With no exaggeration, “Infusorium” is one of my favorite short stories of the last 5 years.