The Sound of Building Coffins

The Sound of Building Coffins is a novel by the American writer Louis Maistros, published in 2009 by the Toby Press. It is set in New Orleans in 1891 and mixes historical fiction with magic and the supernatural.

The book follows the Morningstar siblings, whose father named every one of them after a disease, as they grow up in a city where death and rebirth are ordinary business. Around them Maistros builds a New Orleans of the period: Haitian voodoo practised alongside the Catholicism of the streets, music being worked out in the same rooms where people are dying, photographs taken of the dead, and a society rigidly divided by race and money. Against that background the children are in conflict with a powerful presence that has marked them, and the novel moves between the everyday trade of the city and a spiritual argument about what can be brought back.

The result is a story about a family, a city and a particular moment in the history of American music, told in a register that keeps the supernatural inside the ordinary life of the neighbourhood.