The Trees, by Percival Everett, is a dark and deeply satirical page-turner set in the town of Money in Mississippi, where a series of brutal murders begins to manifest.
At each crime scene are castrated dead white men, and the dessicated corpse of a young black man which keeps mysteriously disappearing. This book was short-listed for last year’s prestigious Booker Prize – I think it could easily have won.
The ironically named Money, Mississippi, is an actual small town, holding a particularly nasty place in the era of the Deep South’s racial violence.
In 1955, a 14-year-old black boy, Emerett Till, who was alleged to have made a remark to a white woman in a store there, was abducted, tortured, mutilated and killed, his body thrown into the local river.…
