It is an unsettling and unsettled terrain perfumed with the morbid excitement of an imminent eclipse, or anticipating a transfigured night furtively disclosed beneath a killing moon. In Jane Burton’s unearthly world (or is it a worldly unearthing?), at the hour of the wolf, hungry ghosts will climb from their graves and from their lovers’ beds; the light shimmers as if reflected off a serpent’s skin, and the atmosphere clings like a veil, like surgical gauze, around a fevered body.
