Barry Gifford cannot leave his characters alone. Since they first appeared in 1990’s phenomenal Wild at Heart, Gifford has been seemingly unable to relinquish the hold lovers-on-the-run Sailor and Lula have over him. That said, they don’t actually appear in Arise and Walk, but persons and events from that book and subsequent tales suffuse this in its every detail.

Arise and Walk is a collage of a book. It intertwines strands of loss and hurt in a tapestry of New Orleans as it barrels toward the end of a century. There is the Reverend Celon Tone, former pastor of the Church of the Fresh Start, now reduced to begging on the streets and straining Sterno through Wonder bread for kicks. There are Spit - the white supremacist - and Ice D - black separatist - forced together by vengeful prison guards who see Curtis and Poitier in The Defiant One and got out of DeSoto and got themselves two guns.

SAVE OUR TOTS, VOTE FOR KROTZ.

And Clarence Kosciusko Krotz, one-time Great and All-Powerful Grand Beast of the Holy Order of Everlasting Yahoos, now running for governor of Louisiana for the Real America Party. And Presciencia Espanto, ‘hottest female televangelist since Dilys Salt’, tumbling into bed with her right-hand woman. And Pace Ripley, beloved son of Sailor and Lula.

And not to mention Marble Lesson (from Sailor’s Holiday) and her sisters at the Mary Mother of God Rape Crisis Center, whose idea of therapy - from guidance in the writings of one Hilda Brausen - goes beyond merely treating the victim to avenging her attackers.

IF ASSHOLES COULD FLY, THIS PLACE WOULD BE AN AIRPORT.

The novel cracks and crackles with on-the-money satire and exhilarating dialogue: a deft, approachable, hallucinatory patchwork. In its deceptive ease, the switch from story to story, the interweaving of character, it resembles nothing so much as a toked-up, gun-toting bayou Short Cuts. Gifford is certainly blessed with some of the same unaffected temperament, the cool razor-edge prose as the late, great Raymond Carver. And while this is altogether more dense, more violent, more sleazy a confection than Carver would ever have served, it retains much of the man’s (black hearted) humanity.

New Orleans comes alive through these pages. Rainwashed (‘Wouldn’t be New Orleans if it weren’t raining’), alien, lecherous. Horny men are taken-in by hookers with dicks and guns. Krotz flirts in the spotlight with eligible women and in back-rooms goes down on an aging pederast who made his fortune off sardines. Newspapers are full of extraterritorials and devices to stop stars from shining, and, to the initiated, guarded Satanic messages.

ELIMINATE DEVIL DEFORM DISTORT DEVISE WEAPON POWERFUL TOOL.

Arise and Walk is a marvellous tale of New Orleanian faith, redemption, chaos and order. Miraculously concise, bleak and ugly, funny and sassy, it is also Gifford’s best book since Wild at Heart.