A Visit To The Bonesetter — Christopher Burns

Nightjar Press publishes limited edition single short-story chapbooks, with something of the uncanny or the gothic or the dark, strange, weird, wonderful and, increasingly, but not exclusively, experimental, about them.

The nightjar – corpse fowl, goatsucker – is a nocturnal bird with an uncanny, supernatural reputation that flies at dusk or dawn as it hunts. It is more often heard than seen, its song a series of ghostly clicks known as a churring. Sylvia Plath, in ‘Goatsucker’, wrote that the ‘Devil-bird’ flies ‘on wings of witch cloth’; David Morley, in ‘Beethoven’s Yellowhammer’, calls it simply ‘Satanic’.