Review: The Sound of Building Coffins

The Sound of Building Coffins
Louis Maistros
Toby Press, 2009
ISBN 1592642551
Hardcover

I first read the first 5000 words of “The Sound of Building Coffins” as part of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awards in 2008.  If I had the rest of the book, I would have finished reading right then.  As it was, those first chapters haunted me. I bought the book as soon as I heard it was available and it did not go onto my massive TBR pile.

The tale begins in 1891 New Orleans as the Creole Age was dying and the Jazz Age was being forged in the fires of poverty and calamity. Nine-year-old Typhus Morningstar is riding his bike to the river with a sack of aborted fetuses courtesy of Dr. Jack. Those babies are going to the river, to be ‘rebirthed’ into catfish. Further down the Mississippi, Marcus Nobody Special is fishing. So far, he’s kept nothing of what he’s caught since he casts his line for a particular catfish.

That same half-moon night, lynchings of Sicilian prisoners take place in the New Orleans jail. Reverend Noonday Morningstar (Typhus’s father) and several of his cohorts are summoned to the wife of one of those men because her infant son is possessed by a demon. They perform a voodoo exorcism using a hand of glory claimed from the child’s hanged father and rebirth the baby afterwards.  Not all of the party survive that night and none remain unscathed. That demon pursues the rest of the party, alive and dead, through the next several years.

New Orleans itself is as strong a character as any. Through the pages, you can feel the damp, hear the hot sweet strains of a cornet changing music history, taste the spice of cajun food, and see the bodies rising out of the ground with the weather. The Crescent City’s call is so strong there are times you have to stop and recollect the storyline, but the effort is very worthwhile.

WARNING:  After reading this book, you’re going to have some cravings for some low country boil and beignets, maybe some crawfish etouffe and Preservation Hall jazz.

Reviewed by Rebecca Kyle.

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February 20, 2010  Tags: ,   Posted in: Full Reviews

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