In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead was published by Hyperion in 1993, and it is perhaps the most characteristic Robicheaux novel — the one that most fully integrates Burke’s literary ambitions with the crime fiction structure. Two investigations run in parallel: Dave is tracking a serial killer who is murdering young women, and he is also dealing with a Hollywood film crew that is shooting a Civil War movie on location near New Iberia. But a third element enters: Dave begins seeing — or hallucinating — a Confederate general and his troops, moving through the mist along the bayou.
Burke does not explain these visions. They may be hallucinations brought on by stress; they may be genuine supernatural encounters; they may be metaphors for the way the past inhabits the present in the Deep South. What they accomplish narratively is to make explicit what is always implicit in Burke’s fiction: that the violence of the present is continuous with the violence of the past, that slavery and the Civil War are not historical events safely contained in the past but living forces that continue to shape the moral landscape of the South.
The serial killer plot and the Confederate ghosts are not parallel narratives but aspects of the same truth: violence repeats because it is never fully acknowledged, never adequately mourned, never atoned for. The land itself remembers what was done on it, and the people who live on it inherit the guilt whether they acknowledge it or not.
Collecting In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead
First edition (Hyperion, New York, 1993): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in fine jacket: $40–$100
- Signed first edition: $100–$250
- Reading copy without jacket: $5–$15