By Michael McCarthy
FROM: The Adroit Journal

This book is a detective story. It’s also a ghost story, a slow-burn thriller, a supernatural horror story, a history of racial violence, and everything in between. No category adequately describes The Trees. Percival Everett seems to have purposefully written it that way. Now that intersectionality is the name of the literary game, his latest book lives not within one genre but at the junction where genres crash into one another, a pile-up so fiery and explosive that it never fails to fascinate. This should be read as a supreme compliment; no book in recent memory contains such magnificently controlled chaos.

Whatever it is, the book takes place in a clearly discernible, real-life area: Money, Mississippi. This Southern backwater was named “in that persistent Southern tradition of irony.” That is, there isn’t much money to be found there. It’s a poor area, strictly segregated, and bereft of any hope for the future. “The name becomes slightly sad,” Everett writes in his characteristically dry prose, “a marker of self-ignorance that might as well be embraced because, let’s face it, it isn’t going away.” Everett never shies away from a joke, despite—or perhaps because of—his morbid subject matter. “It was a long-running joke in Money, Mississippi,” he jests, “that the way to discover who belonged to the Klan was to wait at Russell’s Dry Cleaning and Laundry.” A dark book, but not without humor.

What gets the story rolling is this: Wheat Bryant, a white man, shows up dead in his bathroom. Not just dead but really dead. “A long length of rusty barbed wire was wrapped several times around his neck,” Everett writes. His arm was bent behind his back “at an impossible angle.” An eye was “gouged out or carved out and lay next to his thigh, looking up at him.”

Another man, equally maimed, lies dead next to him. He looks eerily like Emmett Till. 

Wheat’s mother, Granny C, was the woman who told a group of White Southerners that Till catcalled her, a lie that cost him his life.

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