The Trees by Percival Everett

Reviewed by Sally Battson

Short-listed for the Booker prize last year, The Trees is an intensely satirical look at racism and police brutality in America, told as a fast-paced, comedy/thriller.

The story centres around a series of mysterious and gruesome murders in the town of Money, Mississippi - a town historically notorious for the real-life lynching and vicious murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955. The story’s murders bear a striking similarity to the historic crime, but with the details turned on their heads: the victims are all white Klan members and the investigating police are Black detectives. 

The plot involves some macabre twists, including a deceased Black man found at the scene of the first murder, who subsequently and mysteriously disappears from the morgue, only to re-appear at the scene of the later killings, whicht occur in other parts of the county and the country. The investigation brings the detectives into contact with an academic researching the history of racial violence and an elderly activist who has compiled detailed records of almost every reported lynching in US history: a device that gives the author the opportunity to drive home the magnitude and the solemnity of America’s shameful embrace of racism.

This is not to say that the reader feels preached at. Most of the book is played for laughs, albeit with macabre humour. The triumph of the writing is that, although the reader finds themselves laughing out loud, we are also unable to avoid confronting the immensity of the subject matter and the intensity of the racist scourge in America’s past and present.

A powerful and memorable book, both entertaining and thought-provoking.

STOP PRESS: The Trees has also just been short-listed for the 2023 Dublin Literary Awards.