Percival Everett, who made his debut in 1983, was little known to UK readers before his 2001 satire Erasure, the intimate tale of an African-American writer’s existential crisis, framed by a ruthless send-up of the racist publishing industry helping to fuel it. But after that success, Everett’s output – restless as well as prolific, riffing on literary theory, Greek tragedy, westerns – largely escaped British attention. Almost none of his books were in print here before he caught the eye of the small independent press Influx, publisher of last year’s The Trees, a knockabout cop romp that unearthed the history of lynching via a zombie-tinged revenge scenario involving grisly murders of white people in Trump-era Mississippi. Played for laughs yet deadly serious, it made the Booker shortlist and won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction, a mark of its transgressive genius.
