The Trees

by Percival Everett

Overview

An uncanny literary thriller addressing the painful legacy of lynching in the US, by the author of Telephone

Percival Everett’s The Trees is a page-turner that opens with a series of brutal murders in the rural town of Money, Mississippi. When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, they meet expected resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist White townsfolk. The murders present a puzzle, for at each crime scene there is a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till.

The detectives suspect that these are killings of retribution, but soon discover that eerily similar murders are taking place all over the country. Something truly strange is afoot. As the bodies pile up, the MBI detectives seek answers from a local root doctor who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years, uncovering a history that refuses to be buried. In this bold, provocative book, Everett takes direct aim at racism and police violence, and does so in a fast-paced style that ensures the reader can’t look away. The Trees is an enormously powerful novel of lasting importance from an author with his finger on America’s pulse.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781644450642
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	09/21/2021
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	39,802
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Percival Everett is author to more than thirty books. He voted for Joe Biden.

Editorial Reviews

07/12/2021

Everett’s sharp latest (after Telephone) spins a puckish revenge fantasy into dark social satire underpinned by a whodunit. In the archetypal Southern town of Money, Miss., someone is knocking off white men, most with a history of racist views. The first victim is Junior Junior Milam, his skull bashed in and his pants pulled down. Near Junior Junior’s corpse is another, the body of an unidentified Black man. The mystery intensifies with the appearance of more racist white victims, each with a Black corpse laid beside them. Deepening and complicating the story: the Black corpses all disappear, and are replaced by photographs of Emmett Till. The novel unfolds over a hundred super-short chapters, allowing Everett to maintain a breakneck pace as the crime spree spreads north, the FBI becomes involved, and the president weighs in with a painfully tone-deaf address. Everett delves into a miasma of racist stereotypes held toward and among multiple groups, sometimes with the same sophomoric humor applied to characters’ loopy names. (A pair of Asian detectives are named Chin and Ho, a reference to a character from Hawaii Five-O ; Kyle-Lindsay Beet is the High Grand Serpent of the Revived Brotherhood of White Protectors.) Still, this timely absurdist novel produces plenty of chills. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

“Everett has mastered the movement between unspeakable terror and knockout comedy.”—The New York Times Book Review

“[The Trees] blends Everett’s wit with elegy and solemnity.”—The Boston Globe

“With a highwire combination of whodunnit, horror, humor and razor blade sharp insight The Trees is a fitting tribute of a novel: Hard to put down and impossible to forget.”—NPR.org

“In The Trees, Everett’s enormous talent for wordplay—the kind that provokes laughter and the kind that gut-punches—is at its peak. . . . He makes a revenge fantasy into a comic horror masterpiece. He turns narrative stakes into moral stakes and raises them sky-high. Readers will laugh until it hurts.”—Los Angeles Times

“The Trees is a wild book: a gory pulp revenge fantasy and a detective narrative. . . . [It] is just as blood-soaked and just as hilarious as Inglourious Basterds or Django Unchained, but it comes with more authentic historical weight for being set in a dreamlike counterpresent.”—Bookforum

“Uproarious and grisly. . . . Everett forces readers to confront atrocities endured by Black Americans in this briskly paced hybrid of whodunit, madcap comedy, and horror story. . . . It’s a testament to Everett’s immense skill as a writer that he is able to take such grim material and make it hilarious, poignant, and infuriating.”—Michael Magras, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“The Trees is unlike any other. Everett draws from a series of genres—literary novel, police procedural, horror—to create a book that’s both unique and difficult to describe. It’s a delicate balancing act that he pulls off masterfully, another brilliant book by one of the most essential authors in American literature.”—Michael Schaub, Alta Journal

“Everett is going for an unstable cocktail of broad parody, mystery and social justice, and the result feels thrillingly volatile, and brave, a swing at a new kind of novel on American violence.”—Chris Borrelli, Chicago Tribune, 10 Best Books of 2021

“This fierce satire is both deeply troubling and rewarding.”—Booklist, starred review

“At points witty, surreal, and farcical, The Trees is a timely commentary by an American master on the ways that white supremacy continues to haunt us whether we realize it or not.”—Oprah Daily

“The delicate tonal balance of [The Trees] could only be executed by a master like Everett. If there is one commonality of his work, it’s his consistent boldness in executing ideas.”—Lincoln Michel, Biblioracle

“The Trees weaves tropes of pulp-cop noir with trademark acuity and genre-bending inventiveness to deliver a swift, startlingly expansive take on the legacy of lynching in the American South.”—Porter House Review

“A darkly amusing read, The Trees directly addresses racism, police brutality, and a culture of violence in a way that’s as urgent as it is uproarious.”—Ploughshares

From the Publisher