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Trees Paperback – September 21, 2021
| Percival Everett (Author) Find all the books, read about the author, and more. See search results for this author |
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Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize
Winner of the 2022 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
Finalist for the 2022 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
Longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
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.
- Print length320 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherGraywolf
- Publication dateSeptember 21, 2021
- Dimensions5.5 x 0.9 x 8.25 inches
- ISBN-10164445064X
- ISBN-13978-1644450642
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“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
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Graywolf (September 21, 2021)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 320 pages
- ISBN-10 : 164445064X
- ISBN-13 : 978-1644450642
- Item Weight : 14.4 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.9 x 8.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #7,487 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #33 in Small Town & Rural Fiction (Books)
- #173 in Murder Thrillers
- #408 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonReviewed in the United States on October 5, 2022
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The story is long on action and short deft, generally acerbic, character sketches - but short on depth. There are no characters you end up caring much about unless it's to dismiss them as dim-witted racists or simply, "the good guys." Not many in-between.
There is less a plot than a series of events that hammer home a number of very important points about racism: its effects; its persistence.
Time and education, and maybe this book, may chip away at the insulation surrounding bigotry and ignorance, but it is certainly taking a long time. I think that last sentence explains what I got from this story -- and why I gave it four stars vs three.
“The Trees” is basically a screenplay; the reader can “hear” the accents and atrocious grammar, and “see” the gory and gruesome scenes as if they were already on screen.
For me, it started out with a bang and then slid into ridiculousness...but there is a market for this kind of "horror satire" - think "Get Out" , "Django Unchained", and “Parasite”.
3.5 rounded up to 4
Be that as it may, from the very first page I was turned off by his cartoonish characterization of stereotypical white trailer trash. If anyone had written black characters with the same racist tropes the book would never have seen the light of day from a serious publisher. And that is perhaps another thing Everett is trying to do--turn the Aunt Jemima/blackface trope back on itself and do to whites what was done to blacks for hundreds of years--portray them as stupidly ignorant far beyond what any normal person would ever be, give us a bit of our own medicine. And, of course, the black characters were all shown as being intelligent, thoughtful, relatively civilized even when committing horrific murders of retribution that visit punishment generations descended from white lynch mobs.
And, yet, all that said, Everett is a skilled writer and he moves you through his story with an assured narrative voice. It is a quick read yet in a strange way a satisfying one if you can get past the outlandish stereotypes and sarcastic take on murder.
For me, the very core of the book, set off from the goofy slapstick and sci-fi horror story, is the very serious and disturbing list of all the people known to have been lynched in the US in the 20th Century--mainly black but also asian. This solemn list--as solemn as the reading of the 9-11 victims just the other day, but which goes unread and unacknowledged by our society--really shook me. I read each and every name. We should all read them at least once a year. This alone is worth the price of the book and the time to read it.
It is exceptionally funny and, like all good comedies, has a serious base. I'd give it more than 5 stars of I could.
Top reviews from other countries
Carolyn Bryant (“Granny C”), now 85, was said to have been insulted by a 14-year-old black youth, Emmett Till, back in the 1950s. Emmett had not in fact done so, but Carolyn had not denied the story; and Emmett had subsequently been lynched by her husband, Roy Bryant, and her brother, Junior Milam, both Klansmen: Emmett had been beaten, was wrapped in barbed wire, shot in the head, and thrown into a river. It was only years later that Carolyn expressed regret that she had said nothing at the time.
Carolyn believed she was haunted by the ghost of Emmett, and thought she had seen it just before she died. The battered corpse of a black man was sitting in a chair next to her body.
This was after the sons of Roy and of Junior had also been found dead by their wives. The bloody bodies of each of them had barbed wire entwined around their necks, and they had been emasculated; their testicles were clutched in the hands of a black man whose corpse lay next to that of the mutilated white men. On the way to the mortuary, this black men mysteriously disappeared.
These stories went viral on the national news, and two black Special Detectives from the MBI (Mississippi Bureau of Investigation) were sent sent from Hattiesburg to help out the local white sheriffs, who resented their interference. In due course detectives from the FBI were also sent to investigate. (There are altogether too many characters in the book, far more than appear in this review.)
The brother of Junior Milam was found dead in Chicago, similarly mutilated and also with a dead black man next to him.
So far, these revenge killings had been confined to this one family; but they now spread to other members of KKK, first in Money, and then all over the United States. The scenes of these murders are, tediously, described over and over again. But on one occasion the dead body next to them was not black, but Chinese. Obviously the ghosts of lynched Chinese were getting on on the act.
The killings spread even into the White House, where the Secretary of the Treasury was murdered. His screams had the security men swarming all over the White House, and President Trump cowered under the desk in the Oval Office. He later addresses the nation in a grotesque speech to alert them to the danger from the blacks.
By this time, indeed, bands of living black men and of Chinese had been going on a nation-wide orgy of killing whites.
A character who appears frequently is 105-year-old “Mama Z”, real name Adelaide Lynch. Her father had been lynched shortly after her birth, and she had kept a record of nearly every lynching - over seven thousand of them - in the United States since 1913. She said that fewer than 1% of the lynchers had ever been convicted and of those only a fraction had served a sentence.
Eventually the detectives suspect that Mama Z had a hand in organizing the killings. But we never know whether she did or not: the book ends abruptly and totally inconclusively – just one of the drawbacks of a book which is very repetitive, sometimes very confusing, intentionally unrealistic (of course), and full of demotic and foul-mouthed dialogue on the part of the investigators.
I cannot understand how it could ever have been shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize.










