Gotta be the succulent-est book to feature the Axeman of New Orleans. If you don’t know the Axeman of New Orleans, feel free to look him up while I wait here, but be warned: you’ll probably go off your feed. Dave Thompson’s written over 100 books, sayeth Wikipedia; this one’s surely the first featuring recipes, let alone recipes for “Alligator Balls.” That’s alligator meat (location on original alligator unspecified) shaped into one-inch balls. Now you can breathe a little easier.

An Englishman, Thompson acknowledges that he’s a fish out of the fryer. He lays out his first page with a Louisiana fable concluding, “Well, if you need directions, maybe you don’t have any business going there” and then includes a lot of asking directions. But the journey is the reward, as the story of the bluebird of happiness tells us—a story not from Louisiana, but which should be. Thompson writes plenty for quick cash (the used pizza ovens sold through his website must not add up to much) but hunker down with a few paragraphs of a given tome and you can tell when his heart’s in it. His heart’s in this one. Along with those alligator balls.

Two-hundred-and-forty-seven pages including bibliography of course isn’t enough space for the whole of the soul of the Pelican State, but give the man his passion: you get Hank Williams, Huey Long, Robert Johnson, Marie Laveau, Blind Joe Reynolds, Dr. John and Dr. John (if you know what I mean), Zozo Labrique, Jean Lafitte, alligator meat, and potentially deadly swamp critters by the cloud. Thompson corrects us on the true meaning of “Gris-Gris Gumbo Ya Ya” but inserts an error of his own: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn came from the former Samuel Langhorne Clemens, not Longhorne (although maybe that’s a better fit).

For people who don’t need directions, all this may be old news. For anyone else, the linkage of bayou to, say, Alice Cooper and Judas Priest should justify taking this down from the shelf. Alligator balls, optional.