What a strange, wonderful, and unsettling book this is.

Everett, the author of more than two dozen books, has recently gained fame with his latest novel, “James” winning the National Book Award and the Pulitzer in 2024.  A Professor at USC, he had remained relatively unknown until “The Trees” was short-listed for the Booker in 2021 and his novel, “Erasure” became the basis for the award winning movie, “American Fiction.”

“The Trees” is hard to categorize.  A reviewer in ‘The Guardian’ referred to it as ” ….a harsher, more unmediated satire, a fast-paced comedy with elements of crime and horror that directly addresses racism in a boldly shocking manner.”  The book begins as a murder mystery as two White men in the small town of Money, Mississippi are found murdered and mutilated. Next to each of them was the body of a dead Black man who had been mutilated and lynched.  The Black man apparently vanished into thin air after the first murder only to reappear at the scene of the second.  Ed Morgan and Jim Davis, Black detectives with the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation, are sent from Hattiesburg to look into the weird murders/disappearances, and are quickly drawn into the strange doings.  Their wise-cracking dialog is often ‘laugh out loud funny’, but the plot becomes darker and darker as these ritual murders begin to appear across the country, and the book begins to seem more like a horror story or science fiction.

Everett is dealing with the heritage of slavery in the South and exploitation of Chinese laborers in the Far West, and he does so indirectly and powerfully through a focus on Emmett Till’s murder in Money in 1955. But as the killings spread across the country it becomes clearer that there is a much wider reckoning coming, and its surreal elements only make it feel more real.  I’ll avoid a spoiler alert by limiting any further reveal of the plot, but this is a powerful book wonderfully constructed and written.

Everett is the real thing, and like another Black novelist, Colin Whitehead, I would expect that we’ll see more powerful books from him in the future.