Amazement, respect and terrified awe follow the name of Iorialus Bóro. The old artist is renowned for his creative genius and fantastic roster of original characters: a gallant zombie, an adorable pudding-creature and some fearsome deities among them. Emerging painted and sculpted from his cabin in the woods of the Canadian-occupied Republic of Wisconsin, they bolster hearts and comfort souls in the dismal wreckage of the Second American Civil War.

But Bóro also has one peculiar quirk: an insistence on the absolute separation between reality and imagination. Indeed, the mere suggestion that there is anything real about his art draws such wrath from his spleen as has left a career’s trail of cowering art correspondents, humiliated museum curators, and traumatised admirers summarily ejected from his community of fans and supporters, the Bórolites.

Yet what makes art sublime, if not its capacity to shake the barriers between worlds? As the skies darken beneath a waning Moon and the festivals of the liminal season draw near, it transpires his characters might not be quite so fictional as he thinks. Face to face with them, Bóro’s rigid sense of reality is put to the test, and might even place the world in mortal danger. . .