RavePorter House ReviewThe Trees weaves tropes of pulp-cop noir with trademark acuity and genre-bending inventiveness to deliver a swift, startlingly expansive take on the legacy of lynching in the American South ... the novel shapeshifts into something closer to silver screen genre-benders like Get Out or Django Unchained, or maybe Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown crossed with something Elmore Leonard ... At the heart of The Trees is an elegant sleight of hand. Appearing at first dedicated to the tropes implied by its thriller billing and familiar caricature of the white rural south, the novel swiftly departs from the constraints of genre to suggest that Everett’s portrayal of the rural White South is less exaggerated than it initially seems ... Everett is talking with the past in The Trees, but he’s also talking to the present, about the future. To read the book is to be in rare conversation with all three.
