Zombie horror meets Tom Sharpe

Percival Everett turns deep South lynchings into a gory revenge satire that is disconcertingly hilarious

319pp, Influx, T £9.99 (0844 871 1514), RRP £9.99, ebook £4.79 ÌÌÌÌÌ

Mainstream British publishers, belatedly alert to the fact that people of colour write books, have been vowing noisily to get more of them on to their lists for some time now. So why is it that we in Britain have to rely on a tiny independent set-up, Influx Press, to be able to read any new work by Percival Everett – for several decades the leading male African-American novelist?

You can find part of the answer in Everett’s classic literary satire Erasure (2001), in which an AfricanAmerican literature professor despairs that nobody will publish his fiction because he doesn’t write gritty explorations of victimhood in the urban underbelly. Today, publishers still cling to their pigeonholes for reassurance, and I suspect, to many of them, Everett’s rumbustious satires present as a category mistake.

The theme of The Trees, his 22nd novel, is the iniquity of the lynchings that proliferated in the American South for much of the 20th century – perfect material for a heart-rending indictment of endemic racism. But instead of a soulful historical novel that the white reading public could buy in droves in order to feel invigoratingly ashamed, Everett has produced a mixture of zombie horror, detective story and Tom Sharpe-esque farce, making comedy out of subject matter so inappropriate that this reader started looking around nervously in fear that my barks of laughter might be taken down and used in evidence against me.

The novel is set in the decrepit town of Money, Mississippi, during the Trump presidency. Everett, who often centres his novels on real people, focuses here on an elderly white woman gradually revealed to be Carolyn Bryant, who, in reality, in 1955 accused a black 14-year-old, Emmett Till, of behaving inappropriately towards her: the boy was then lynched by her husband and his brother. (Still with us at 88, Bryant recently revealed that she fabricated the allegation.)

Everett’s fictional Bryant is the matriarch of a family of rednecks who carry on the family tradition of racism. (When a white interviewer recently complained that the white southern characters in the book were stereotyped, Everett replied: “Good. How does it feel?”) Then somebody starts killing the Bryants off in obscene parodies of lynchings, with a corpse closely resembling Till popping up at each murder scene before vanishing.

In come two wisecracking African-American city cops, butting heads with the local sheriff – one of Money’s more decent residents, in that “he tries to not be the racist a--hole he can’t help being”. The rhythms and conventions of police procedural provide an orientating counterpoint of conventionality to an increasingly surreal – and eventually rather repetitive – catalogue of mayhem and murder, as the mass purge of racists goes nationwide.

This is satire in the great tradition of Swift by way of South Park: scabrous, over the top, in love with jokes for their own sake as well as their ability to point to a moral. There is an endless succession of characters with nutty names – Fancel Fondle, Dr Helvetica Quip, Sheriff

To complaints that he was stereotyping whites, he said: ‘Good. How does it feel?’

Chalk Pellucid, Detective Wesley Snipes (no relation) – and bizarre jobs, including the man who cleans the genitals in a battery-farm-style corporate funeral parlour. Not every gag comes off: we don’t really need the umpteenth take-off of President Trump. But the hit-andmiss approach to the comedy adds to the charm, and when Everett hits the bullseye – as in a very funny dig at Clint Eastwood – you’ll be laughing at the pet-startling level.

In among all this burlesque, the occasional, incongruous moments of serious reflection on the barbaric treatment of Mississippi’s black population – Everett provides a list of names of lynching victims that spans several pages – fail to gain much purchase on the reader’s sensibilities. With its righteous revelling in mass vengeance, the novel is more concerned with gleefully proclaiming an extreme hatred than provoking pity or anger. Enjoyable as it is, I’m not sure I’d call it salutary; but it is refreshing, at least, to read a book that comes from a part of the psyche that most publishers don’t want anything to do with.