The Trees - Outside of a Dog

Paperback, 288 pages

Published Sept. 21, 2021 by Graywolf Press.

ISBN:: 978-1-64445-064-2
OCLC Number:: 1268220252

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 …

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 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.

Winner of the 2022 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize
Finalist for the 2022 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award
Longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction

3 editions

73pctGeek reviewed The Trees by Percival Everett

Gruesome, and darkly amusing

3 stars

A pair of MBI detectives are sent to Money, Mississippi, to investigate a series of brutal murders, where each crime scene also appears to have an unexpected second body.

I feel somewhat ambivalent about this novel. It’s well-written, and interesting, but ultimately felt a bit unresolved. I’m sure I missed certain things that had I been more steeped in US culture I’d understand differently or better. Everett has a lot of fun with the character names, and it was a treat every time someone new entered the chat.

It’s a gruesome novel, and unfolds differently than first expected. I went in cold, then quickly realised The Trees is much more layered than a straight crime novel. While I didn’t dislike it, and will read more Everett, I suspect I started on a high point by reading James first.

gregorgross reviewed The Trees by Percival Everett

Deadly funny and the book the US needs

5 stars

White "good Christians" get slaughtered and mutilated in Money, Mississippi, and every single time a dead Black person is also found. The Black corpse disappears, and police and FBI have no clue what's going on.

We get to see how this feels for relatives of the victims, who turn out to be not so good and not so Christian at all. All current victims were perpetrators of lynchings. We get to read pages of names of Black lynching victims, and pages of lists of places where they were lynched - and we learn how police "forgot" to investigate, often because they were directly involved and so on.

And still, the book is written in a very funny way. It's a page-turner by design, I guess: we need to read about the lynchings, we need to understand they are part of the US history. And best way is a …

White "good Christians" get slaughtered and mutilated in Money, Mississippi, and every single time a dead Black person is also found. The Black corpse disappears, and police and FBI have no clue what's going on.

We get to see how this feels for relatives of the victims, who turn out to be not so good and not so Christian at all. All current victims were perpetrators of lynchings. We get to read pages of names of Black lynching victims, and pages of lists of places where they were lynched - and we learn how police "forgot" to investigate, often because they were directly involved and so on.

And still, the book is written in a very funny way. It's a page-turner by design, I guess: we need to read about the lynchings, we need to understand they are part of the US history. And best way is a book that makes every effort to be read. This is the book.

I find it important to remember this topic: lynchings, by white men, on no reason whatsoever, like with Emmitt Till, 14 years, who supposedly has said "Hi" to a white woman in Money, Mississippi, and was killed, slaughtered, mutilated, shot. His face was mutilated so much he wasn't recognizable anymore (s. Wikipedia for a picture of this by scrolling down to his funeral: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till). The white woman later recanted her story, but did not suffer any consequences. Tills murders were acquitted by a white jury.