The trees A novel

Everett, winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, has written 20-plus darkly ingenious novels, including Telephone (2020). Here he explores the legacy of lynching in a phantasmagoric police procedural. Emmett Till, a 14-year-old Chicagoan lynched in Money, Mississippi, in 1955, haunts the book, which is set in contemporary Money and its hardscrabble outskirts. In a series of grotesque crime scenes, the corpse of a young Black man with a startling resemblance to Till is found over and over again, opposite the body of a recently, gruesomely murdered white man. The local cops are lazy (they hate crime scenes because of the paperwork), incompetent, and racist to the bone. Enter a team of two Black special detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation assigned to help the fumbling Money authorities. The Black detectives are unflappably witty in the face of hostility, sort of like the "Men in Black" dealing with repulsive aliens, but with two cool Black guys encountering the strangeness. As more bodies of white men turn up next to Till clones around the country, the investigation expands, taking the reader deep into the history of lynching. Though at times Everett's edgy surrealism goes a bit off the rails, this fierce satire is both deeply troubling and rewarding.

Everett's sharp latest (after Telephone) spins a puckish revenge fantasy into dark social satire underpinned by a whodunit. In the archetypal Southern town of Money, Miss., someone is knocking off white men, most with a history of racist views. The first victim is Junior Junior Milam, his skull bashed in and his pants pulled down. Near Junior Junior's corpse is another, the body of an unidentified Black man. The mystery intensifies with the appearance of more racist white victims, each with a Black corpse laid beside them. Deepening and complicating the story: the Black corpses all disappear, and are replaced by photographs of Emmett Till. The novel unfolds over a hundred super-short chapters, allowing Everett to maintain a breakneck pace as the crime spree spreads north, the FBI becomes involved, and the president weighs in with a painfully tone-deaf address. Everett delves into a miasma of racist stereotypes held toward and among multiple groups, sometimes with the same sophomoric humor applied to characters' loopy names. (A pair of Asian detectives are named Chin and Ho, a reference to a character from Hawaii Five-O ; Kyle-Lindsay Beet is the High Grand Serpent of the Revived Brotherhood of White Protectors.) Still, this timely absurdist novel produces plenty of chills. (Sept.)