Percival Everett, _The Trees_

 I THINK THE Trees is still Percival Everett's most recent novel, but odds are it won't be much longer--he's that prolific. He is also unpredictable, inventive, canny, inspired, prophetic--not to mention deft in any genre he feels like picking up, from metafiction to fantasy to Western. 

The Trees traffics in noir and in the ghost story simultaneously. A well-known local white man turns up dead in Money, Mississippi, alongside a longer-dead corpse of a black man no one recognizes. While the police investigate, the black man's corpse disappears--only to turn up alongside the recently-killed corpse of another local white man. In both cases, the dead white man's testicles have been forcibly removed from his body and are to be found in the tight grip of the dead black man.  Next thing you know, the black corpse disappears again, only to turn up next to....

You get the idea. Since Money, Mississippi, is the town where Emmett Till was murdered, we begin to wonder: is the ghost of Till walking, taking a long-deferred revenge? For the dead white men are the descendants of the men who killed Emmett Till.

Turns out, eventually, that there is a more down-to-earth, wholly natural explanation for the deaths in Money, Mississippi, but soon there is a national outbreak of sudden, violent death among the descendants of lynchers, all found alongside another corpse, sometimes Black, sometimes Chinese. 

The Trees is a kind of fable, then, wrapped in a couple of layers of genre fiction. 

Sometimes it is farcical, as in the names that seem inspired by Dickens (the Rev. Cad Fondle, Prof. Damon Thruff) or Bennie Hill (FBI agent Herberta "Herbie" Hind). Even though Everett is capable of shrewd social and psychological depiction, he mainly goes for the archetypal here: the redneck sheriffs, the white trash Klansmen, the diner called "Dinah," the wisecracking out-of-town detectives, and the omniscient matriarchal crone who lies behind it all. There is a spot-on parody of Trump's speaking style in Chapter 103. You could almost decide not to take it at all seriously.

But then there is Chapter 64, at ten pages the book's longest, which is basically just a list--a list of people lynched in the United States since 1913. The names here are all too real. And they include the names of victims of recent police violence, as if to emphasize that extra-judicial murder is still extra-judicial murder even when it has a uniform on.

The Trees is a swift read, briskly paced, often funny, but not at all funny by the end. 

Does anyone know why Chapters 74 and 104 are not here?