Going to New Orleans

Lewis King is a trumpet player who lands a gig in the Big Easy. He is a genius on horn, but King’s private life is, morally, physically, and financially bankrupt. A heavy drinker and compulsive sexual manipulator, he is prone to paranoid fits of violent rage. Ms Sugarlicq, his girlfriend, can’t keep her pants on. They’re perfect for each other…A fantastic and graphic first-person narrative, Going to New Orleans serves as a surreal, yet faithful, guide to the food, music, history, and literature of New Orleans. A dirty book, but also a spiritual book one..If books had bloodlines, Going to New Orleans would be a cousin to both Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter and Tom Walmsley’s Doctor Tin, and a bastard grandchild of Georges Bataille’s The Story of the Eye. Like Slaughter, the protagonist is a horn player with a dark side, New Orleans in all its voodoo glory is a central character, and the language is evocative and spare. As with Tin and Eye, the all-pervasive sexuality is transgressive, perverse, algolagnic, and disturbingly captivating, like seeing a car wrecked after running the red-light district. — Georgia Straight, Sept. 2004