The Trees
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4.5 • 22 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
When hog thief Junior Junior Milam is found brutally murdered, the police of Money, Mississippi, are stumped. When his cousin is found dead in the same gruesome fashion, it’s time for the MBI—the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation—to step in.
Special detectives Ed and Jim expect resistance from the local sheriff, the coroner and a string of racist White townsfolk. What they don’t expect is an inexplicable mystery: at each crime scene a second dead body was found—that of the same Black man. A man who looks eerily familiar.
As similar murders are reported from Illinois to California, the 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.
Provocative, fast-paced and morbidly funny, The Trees is an urgent novel of lasting importance, from an author with a finger on America’s pulse.
Percival Everett is the author of more than thirty books. His novel Telephone was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and he received the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Awards. He teaches at the University of Southern California and lives in Los Angeles.
‘Everett has mastered the movement between unspeakable terror and knockout comedy.’ New York Times Book Review
‘[The Trees] blends Everett’s wit with elegy and solemnity.’ 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
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
