The Trees

The Trees Review

Money, Mississippi. Population 452. The place where Emmett Till was murdered in 1955. It is here that Percival Everett sets his 2021 novel, and the choice is not atmospheric: The Trees is a novel about racial violence in America, about what goes unremembered and what refuses to stay buried, and Money is precisely the right address for that subject.

The plot begins as a crime novel. White supremacists in Money are turning up dead — brutally killed, their bodies left alongside the mutilated corpse of a Black man who matches the description of Emmett Till. The body keeps disappearing from the morgue. Two Black detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, Ed Morgan and Jim Davis, arrive to investigate. They are smart, dry, and under no illusions about the community they have entered. The white characters they interview are rendered with a satirical broadness that is clearly intentional — cartoons of bigotry — and the detectives move through them with the weary competence of men who have been navigating this particular landscape their entire lives.

But The Trees is not finally a crime novel, and Everett is not finally interested in solving the mystery in the genre sense. The novel expands, darkens, and becomes something stranger: a reckoning with the full scope of American lynching, anchored by one of contemporary fiction’s most haunting characters. Mama Z is an elderly Black woman in Money who has spent fifty years maintaining a handwritten record of every documented lynching in American history. Her list runs to thousands of names. The weight of those names — their accumulation, their specificity, the labor of recording them — gives the novel’s more fantastical elements their moral authority.

The Trees was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022 and introduced Everett’s work to a substantially larger audience than his previous novels had reached. The novel’s final movement, which expands the premise to something approaching prophecy, will not satisfy every reader — but it is earned by the precision and control of everything that precedes it. Everett is working in the tradition of Ellison and Morrison: using the full resources of American literary experimentalism to say what realism alone cannot contain.

Crime Fiction as a Trojan Horse

The first and most disarming of Everett’s strategies is genre. The Trees opens as a brisk, propulsive police procedural — special detectives Ed Morgan and Jim Davis arrive in Money to make sense of impossible murders, trading the dry, deadpan banter of a buddy-cop novel as they navigate a town of grotesquely racist white residents. Later they are joined by the FBI’s Herberta Hind, and the genre machinery hums along: clues, autopsies, a vanishing body, a widening pattern. Everett uses this familiar, page-turning frame as a Trojan horse, smuggling the reader into a confrontation with American lynching by way of a form they came to for entertainment. The detectives’ weary competence and gallows humor make the horror approachable even as the body count and the historical echoes accumulate, and the pleasure of the procedural becomes the hook that holds the reader through material that straightforward realism might make unbearable.

The Names of the Dead

The novel’s moral and emotional center is Mama Z, a 105-year-old Black woman in Money who has kept, for the entirety of her long life, a handwritten archive of every documented lynching in American history — thousands upon thousands of names. When a young academic named Damon Thruff begins transcribing her records, the act of writing the names down, one by one, becomes the book’s central ritual of witness. Everett understands that atrocity at scale becomes an abstraction, a number, and that the only way to restore its weight is to insist on the particular: this person, and this one, and this one. The accumulation of names is the novel’s most powerful effect, and it is what lends the increasingly fantastical plot its unshakeable moral authority. The dead, the book insists, have names, and recording them is itself a form of resistance.

Satire as the Only Adequate Form

Some readers balk at the cartoonish broadness with which Everett draws his white Mississippians — the buffoonish bigots with names like Junior Junior, the casual, almost gleeful racism. But the exaggeration is a deliberate and considered choice. Everett’s wager is that realism is inadequate to the obscenity of his subject, that only satire — comedy pushed to the edge of horror — can hold the true scale of what American racial violence is and refuse to let the reader look comfortably away. The laughter the novel provokes is never relief; it is the uneasy, trapped laughter of recognizing something monstrous. By making the absurdity of white supremacy literally absurd, Everett strips it of the dignity that solemn treatment can inadvertently grant, and forces a more honest reckoning than a purely tragic register could.

The Turn Toward Apocalypse

What begins as a contained mystery escalates, in the novel’s back half, into something vast and unclassifiable. The killings spread beyond Money, beyond Mississippi, across the country, as the dead of America’s racial history seem to rise in a wave of reckoning that the authorities cannot comprehend or contain. Everett shifts register into the apocalyptic and prophetic, and the move is the book’s most divisive: some readers find the leap thrilling and earned, others a step too far from the grounded crime novel they began. But the escalation is the point. Everett is dramatizing the idea that the past does not stay past — that unaddressed historical violence does not dissipate but accumulates, and must eventually be answered. The ending refuses catharsis or resolution, leaving the reader suspended in the face of a reckoning still underway.

Everett’s Breakthrough Moment

The Trees marked a turning point in the long, prolific career of Percival Everett, a writer admired for decades (Erasure, I Am Not Sidney Poitier) but never widely read until the Booker shortlist brought him a mainstream audience — the same wave of recognition that would crest with his later, acclaimed James. Reading it, you encounter a novelist in complete command of his tools, working consciously in the experimental, politically charged tradition of Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison while sounding like no one but himself. It is fierce, funny, formally daring, and morally serious in equal measure — a novel that uses every resource of fiction to say what the historical record alone cannot.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — A ferocious, formally daring crime-fiction satire that confronts American lynching by treating it as absurdist horror: funny, harrowing, and anchored by the unbearable weight of the names of the dead.

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