Refreshing, rewarding, raucous satire.

I read this book in one sitting and marvelled on every page. Everett’s ability to balance the brutality of lynching with macabre humour is unique.

This author is quickly becoming an auto-buy author for me. I loved James was recommended this by my local library. A white man is found brutally murdered, with a black man lying beside the body holding the victim’s severed genitals. But then black man disappears from the morgue and another killing occurs and the same black man is found at the scene again! What follows is a violent, chaotic and deeply unsettling chain of revenge killings rooted in America’s horrific history of lynching and racial violence. Percival Everett blends gruesome tragedy and brutality with humour amazingly and I found myself laughing and appalled by the characters. The short chapters make the pacing relentless, with each scene becoming more absurd, shocking and symbolic than the last. Even the cover begins to make disturbing sense once you’ve read the book.What makes this book so devastating is the reminder that these issues will never truly disappear. The violence may look different now, but the hatred, prejudice and injustice still continue in one form or another. I finished this feeling delighted by the writing, disgusted by the brutality and devastated by the reality underneath it all. Completely unforgettable.

Couldn't put it down. Serious and very funny at the same time

Wow. This is powerful stuff. To get from the funny, if grisly, fast-paced police procedural Everett launches us into at the beginning to where he leaves us at the end of this book is quite a feat. The short chapters (paced like an episode of a disposable but moreish TV series), pinsharp dialogue, and hilariously savage characterisation of the proud ‘rednecks’ of Money, Mississippi are immediately engaging, and Everett uses familiar tropes right up to the penultimate scene to place us in a place of discomforting complicity, highlighting a complacency (or even apathy) towards the racism that has plagued the USA since its inception. At the heart of this story (and the physical book) is a list of names of people killed through lynching (and its modern-day equivalent, Everett argues, police violence). The whole tone of the book shifts on the presentation of this list. Immediately preceding it, we are put into a position of fully understanding its importance, so there is no question of skimming through it, or not reading every name with the due consideration it deserves. Interspersed with unfamiliar names and anonymous deaths are familiar recent tragic losses, like Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and Philando Castile, and these really hit home that the pages of names (only a fraction of those written ‘in world’) are all real human beings that deserve remembrance and respect. There is so much I could say about Everett’s skill and craftsmanship in this novel’s construction and the smart details he uses to guide us as readers on this discomforting journey, but that would be an academic exercise, and Everett makes it quite explicit via one of his characters (an academic) that a measured response is inadequate in the face of the truths he confronts us with. The fact we are not learning anything new in this novel is possibly what makes it so powerful. Everett makes us laugh out loud, then wonder how anything could be funny in a world that allows such terror and tragedy to exist. This feels like an incredibly important book and the world looks different having read it.