There will always be a danger involved in writing ambitious novels. The risks are great, because who knows whether readers will be adventurous enough to follow where the intrepid author wants to go? Louis Maistros has been there, done that. His previous novel, The Big Punch (2000), was a highly adventurous noir romp through a Dantean Hell complete with all the trimmings. Somewhere (an interview?) the author is quoted as claiming "It's not very good," but it's a disingenuous claim, because the reviews were pretty darn good. I know, I wrote one of them. If the author has disowned that first novel, it's a shame partly because one can almost trace the progression through his mind that led to The Sound of Building Coffins. That and the influence of a life lived in both pre- and post-Katrina New Orleans.

The Big Punch—besides being a bit of a sucker-punch—was also like a discordant jazz solo. Sometimes it hurts the ears, sometimes you can't quite pick out the melody, sometimes it sounds a little like a mess—but when it clicks, it really clicks. Some dig it immediately, "getting" its rebellion against the normal, typical, easy, bland. Thus noting that musician and record/voodoo shop owner Maistros styles his fiction a little like the blaring horn riffs of his beloved jazz isn't exactly astute. Like the fact that the city's famed atmosphere will play a role in the story, it's a given.

The Sound of Building Coffins begins with a sequence of imagery that easily grabs the readers and shouldn't let go. Since the novel is imperfect, it tends to let go a little in the middle, where the sag—or perhaps those discordant jazz notes—threatens to lose the audience's attention. But then, like a solo reined in at its very end, it manages to reignite the flickering interest and the song ends with a bang-up finale.

At the start, we follow young Typhus Morningstar on a night ride to the river and to a task that is both grotesque and beautiful. Indeed, many of the novel's set pieces are both, for the paradox makes a strong statement. Typhus's mission with a burlap bag full of aborted fetuses raises warning from the start that we are not in the realm of the normal. Perhaps it's magical realism, perhaps it's horror, perhaps it's gothic—most likely it's like a voodoo potion, a bit of this and a dash of that, and don't ask.

The patriarch of the Morningstar family is Noonday, a respected preacher who named his children after diseases: Typhus, Diphtheria, Malaria, Cholera, Dropsy. When Noonday is called to quell what may be the demonic possession of a young immigrant boy, Typhus disobeys and tags along. The afflicted child's father is one of a group of prisoners about to be lynched. It appears a voodoo-summoned demon is indeed involved, and several of those who have ventured to the scene will never be the same. Noonday will not live through the night. Buddy Bolden, not yet known as "King" (and Father of Jazz), will end up in an insane asylum years later while still a young man, though the innovative sound he's been laying about town with his cornet will have taken hold and fluorished. The use of the historical Bolden is a touch of genius, allowing the novel to become metaphorical in several different ways. What happens to the possessed child, the Morningstar children, and the people who swirl about them like the waters of the Mississippi takes up the bulk of the novel's next fifteen years, leading up to a 1906 destroyer/purifier hurricane that's clearly an allegory for Katrina. Perhaps a simplistic choice for a climax, it still feels right.

The Sound of Building Coffins calls to mind S.P. Somtow's Darker Angels, another phantasmagorical novel that utilizes its Civil War concentric story-within-a-story structure to great effect. While the two novels differ in almost every way, including structure, the darkness of their themes connect them. Maistros uses something more akin to a Pulp Fiction-style structure, forcing the reader to wait until the end to show what set everything in motion and fearlessly dipping into surrealism along the way. Occasionally a bit self-consciously literary (for instance see: "the owner of the scream" rather than "the screamer"), some of its verbal flourishes call attention to themselves and jar the reader out of the era, which is otherwise well-realized. New Orleans itself, with its life and death atmosphere, becomes a character as one would expect. Water imagery of rebirth and redemption abounds, as the eternal river carries out the old and gives death new life, both in actuality and metaphorically in the life of the city.

Ambitious and complex, though sometimes frustrating and confusing, The Sound of Building Coffins is the kind of novel that rewards slow and careful reading. Sticking through the less-engaging middle pays off like the jumpy jazz solo that finally brings the band back in so they can finish harmoniously. Louis Maistros continues to lay the foundation of a serious career in the American novel, though the soloing reveals a tendency to want to stretch its boundaries. As a reader who appreciates the "out there" aspect of a good and challenging solo, whether jazz or prog or blues or even simple rock and roll, I say, play on.