The Trees

The Trees is Percival Everett's 2021 novel, the Booker Prize shortlist book of 2022 and the structural pivot that brought Everett's broader literary readership to the satirical-horror-and-historical-revenge register before James (2024). The structural premise is a series of brutal murders in Money, Mississippi (the actual town where Emmett Till was lynched in August 1955). The corpses of the murdered white men are each accompanied by a second corpse — a Black man whose body matches Emmett Till's description, who keeps showing up at the local morgue alongside the white-victim bodies, and then disappears from the morgue before any white official can document or identify him. Mississippi Bureau of Investigation special detectives Ed Morgan and Jim Davis are dispatched to the case along with FBI Special Agent Herberta 'Herbie' Hind to investigate. The pattern of identical murders begins to repeat across the United States.

Everett's structural method is the patient satirical-and-thriller construction that allows the novel to do the literary-historical-revenge work the contemporary American literary fiction market has been working toward for decades. The Money, Mississippi setting and the historical Carolyn Bryant-Donham material is rendered with the kind of patient moral seriousness the actual historical record requires; the novel uses the contemporary mystery-thriller form to do the literary-historical work that conventional historical fiction has not been able to. The Mama Z subplot (the elderly Black woman in Money who has been documenting every American lynching for one hundred and four years and whose role in the contemporary murders the novel slowly reveals) is the structural emotional engine. The novel's structural payoff (the systematic continental-scale revenge organizing across the rest of the United States) is one of the most-discussed contemporary American literary endings in recent memory.

Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading, as the structural pivot in the Everett catalog before James, and for fans of James, The Underground Railroad, and contemporary American literary-historical-revenge fiction. Compare to The Nickel Boys (Colson Whitehead) and the broader contemporary American literary fiction tradition. The Dion Graham audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.