Coming Through Slaughter is a brief, impressionistic, and oddly haunting novel about a jazz cornet player in New Orleans, circa 1900.

Like its enigmatic title — enigmatic even when you learn that Slaughter is a town in Louisiana — this short book bristles with loose ends. A poet's novel, it is put together like a collage out of lists, scraps of dialogue, song lyrics, private thoughts, a blurry photo of the Buddy Bolden Band, and even a soundprint of the cries of dolphins.

Buddy Bolden, a real-life musician and the book's main character, lives intensely and recklessly even for a town known for those qualities. He is a drinker, a part-time barber, the publisher of a gossip rag called the Cricket, an impulsive lover, and a cornet player of wild talent and abandon. Whether for these or other reasons, he loses his mind one day at a parade and spends the rest of his life as a mental patient.

Coming Through Slaughter has none of the lush writing of Anil's Ghost or the romantic sweep of The English Patient, but it paints an unsettling picture of a city that was living on the edge long before Hurricane Katrina. It is worth reading if only for the sketches of Buddy Bolden's friend, the Storyville photographer E. J. Bellocq: a much less impulsive man than Bolden but even more self-destructive, taking his carefully composed portraits of the prostitutes of Storyville and then slashing them with a knife. “The making and destroying coming from the same source, same lust, same surgery his brain was capable of.”