
Rating: ★★★★½ (4.5/5)
Percival Everett’s The Trees is a blistering, darkly satirical, and hauntingly powerful novel that tackles one of America’s deepest and most enduring wounds: the legacy of lynching and racial violence. Set in the fictional town of Money, Mississippi the same place where 14-year-old Emmett Till was murdered in 1955 the story begins as a bizarre, gruesome murder mystery and evolves into something far more profound, unsettling, and unforgettable.
When two detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, Ed and Jim, arrive in Money to investigate a series of brutal killings, they discover something inexplicable. At each crime scene, alongside the body of a murdered white man, lies the corpse of a Black man who bears an uncanny resemblance to Emmett Till. Yet by the time the bodies reach the morgue, the Black body has mysteriously vanished. What begins as a standard police procedural quickly spirals into a nationwide reckoning as similar killings erupt across America. The dead, it seems, are no longer content to rest quietly beneath the soil of history.
Everett uses this chilling premise to craft a sharp, genre-bending narrative that blends horror, absurdist comedy, and biting social commentary. The novel’s rapid-fire pacing, built from short, taut chapters, propels the reader through a landscape that is both grotesquely funny and painfully real. The humor is deliberate and cutting a weapon turned against America’s long history of white supremacy and denial. Everett’s dialogue crackles with energy, his characters often caricatures of ignorance and hatred, their buffoonery exposing the moral rot beneath the surface of small-town racism.
The novel’s brilliance lies in its audacious tonal balance. One moment, the reader may laugh at the absurd antics of the locals, only to feel that laughter catch in their throat as the story pivots to the haunting recitation of names names of those who were lynched. These lists of victims are perhaps the book’s most powerful moments, forcing us to confront how many lives have been erased and how often history refuses to remember them. As one character, Mama Z, observes, “The saddest names are those of the unknown, because even their deaths were stolen from memory.”
Everett’s writing, as always, is razor-sharp and fearless. He refuses to offer comfort or closure, instead forcing readers to question the meaning of justice in a country where “less than one percent of lynchers were ever convicted.” Through the lens of revenge and resurrection, The Trees asks us to consider whether retribution can ever balance centuries of racial terror and what it means when the dead themselves demand accountability.
The book’s dark humor is intentional and biting, a mirror to a society that has often trivialized or ignored racial suffering. In interviews, Everett admitted he wasn’t aiming for fairness: “I’m not fair in this novel,” he said. “It’s not a novel about fairness.” The unfairness is precisely the point. For too long, justice in America has been anything but fair.
Stylistically, The Trees reads like a hybrid of Mark Twain and Toni Morrison, or perhaps Jordan Peele’s Get Out crossed with a police procedural. It’s both a page-turner and a philosophical provocation. As Ron Charles of The Washington Post aptly described it, this is a novel that “shouldn’t be possible” a shocking and shockingly funny story about America’s original sin.
What elevates The Trees beyond satire or social commentary is its emotional weight. The humor doesn’t soften the horror; it amplifies it. Each grotesque joke, each absurd exchange, makes the reality of what Everett is exposing even more unbearable. The absurd becomes the only language left for describing a country that has normalized such cruelty.
The Trees is one of those rare novels that lingers long after the final page. It is part ghost story, part protest, part elegy. It demands not only to be read, but to be reckoned with. By the end, the question Everett poses is chilling and unforgettable: Is this justice or vengeance? And can America tell the difference?
A provocative masterpiece of wit, rage, and truth, The Trees deserves every accolade it has received. It is one of the most important and unsettling books of the past decade.
If you’re ready to confront the ghosts of America’s past through a brilliant blend of crime, horror, and social critique, you can find The Trees on Amazon here: Buy the book on Amazon.