New Orleans novel macabre but moving

Not all the living are living, nor all the dead dead in Louis Maistros’ mystical new novel of voodoo and jazz.

In “The Sound of Building Coffins,” the veil between the corporeal and spiritual worlds is so porous that people on either side can pass back and forth, seeking revenge or atonement.

“Coffins” is set in turn-of-the-century New Orleans, where, explains Maistros, residents have “a long and curious relationship with death, a closeness, a delicate truce. They say in New Orleans death is so close that the dead are mostly buried above ground, that the dead share altitude with the living. Death is so close here that parades are thrown in place of funerals. … Life is short the world over, but the truth is more acute here and so life is lived as if endless. Here is where bad hands are played for all they’re worth. Here is where miracles come up from mud.”

Everyone in the sprawling, complex “Coffins” has been dealt a bad hand, especially 9-year-old Typhus Morningstar. His mother died giving birth to him, and he is about to lose his Baptist-preacher father in a horrific episode that will forever stunt his growth.

As the story opens, Typhus is working, carrying a sack of aborted babies to the Mississippi River to “rebirth” them by shaping them into something resembling fish and sending them on their watery way. And with that one disturbing image, we know that this is not a book for the squeamish or the evangelical.

This is a book in which demons possess toddlers, sons stab fathers, mobs lynch innocents. Boys earn a living by fighting rats and girls by sleeping with abusive sailors. But readers who can tolerate its dark themes will be rewarded with an imaginative, engrossing story that vividly captures a time and place.

Maistros, a first-time novelist who owns a record shop and voodoo botanica in New Orleans, juggles a small city’s worth of characters —- Typhus, his father, a witch doctor, a pair of prostitutes, a noseless gravedigger, an ancient voodoo “mambo” and her addled sister, and a fictionalized version of the real-life Buddy Bolden.

Bolden, considered by many the creator of jazz, suffered a mental breakdown at age 30 and spent the rest of his life in an asylum. “Coffins” offers a supernatural explanation for his collapse.

It also adds a supernatural twist to the very real 1891 lynching of a group of Italian immigrants falsely accused of killing the city’s police chief. Maistros’ reimagining of one of the men’s harrowing last minutes on earth sets in motion much of the plot.

In the first half of the book, Maistros handles his ever-expanding world with breathtaking assuredness. He gives us con games and boxing matches and voodoo ceremonies. He shows us the red light district of Storyville and the green, breathable water of the Spirit World.

But in the third quarter he fumbles a bit, losing his grip on a few characters and putting others through one-too-many awful moments. Fortunately he recovers, finding a satisfying conclusion that brings us a few surprises and a sense of hope.

Because in spite of all of the death and violence and betrayal, “Coffins” is also filled with love. Love moves characters to commit terrible acts, but it also drives them to right their wrongs. Love offers second chances, sometimes in this life and sometimes in the one beyond.

And with love comes hope, hope that perseveres even in the midst of destruction.

Near the novel’s end, a devastating storm whips through New Orleans. In a scene that will surely remind readers of more recent times, Buddy Bolden stands on a roof watching water rise in the streets. But what he feels isn’t despair:

“As the city dies,” he thinks as buildings crash around him, “so the city is reborn.”

FICTION

“The Sound of Building Coffins” by Louis Maistros; Toby Press; 372 pages; $24.95