The House in the Pines

“She took out a bottle of gin from the freezer. White vapor swirled from its neck as she twisted off the cap and filled the tiny glass up to the brim, raised it—Cheers!—to their mugging faces, and made herself a promise: Tomorrow morning, she would tell Dan the reason that she hadn’t been herself these past few days, the reason she couldn’t sleep or eat. She would tell him she was going through Klonopin withdrawal.”

This passage introduces one of the novel’s key themes: Recovering From Trauma and Addiction. In addition to establishing Maya’s struggles with Klonopin and alcohol, the passage also characterizes Maya as an unreliable narrator. Klonopin withdrawal can cause hallucinations and alcohol can affect one’s mental state, calling Maya’s reporting of her experiences into question.

“They’d been paired up for a report on Emily Dickinson and bonded over poetry. Poetry was part of why they worked, the shared ability to be swept away by a beautiful line. But it was also that neither quite belonged—Aubrey, the perpetual new girl, and Maya with her nose in a book. She looked Hispanic but had grown up with a single white mom and knew very little about her family in Guatemala. She didn’t feel she fit in with the other Hispanic kids, while not being white meant she stuck out in Pittsfield.”

Maya and Aubrey’s friendship grows out of a shared love of creativity and a sense of being outsiders. They also share a fragmented sense of home—from moving around a lot while growing up for Aubrey and from Maya’s diverse cultural heritage. These key character traits form the basis of their important friendship: Together, they finally find a place to belong, until Frank comes along.

“There was no weapon, no poison, no contact of any kind. No bloodshed or wounds on Aubrey’s body. Maya couldn’t prove it—couldn’t explain it, even—but she insisted that he had deceived them all somehow. Maybe if she’d had a shred of evidence, the police would have taken her seriously. But, as it was, they questioned Frank and, finding no reason to keep him, let him go—with a warning to Maya about false accusations. They said she could ruin a man’s life that way.”

Maya’s accusations against Frank are hard to believe because there seems to be no rational way for him to have killed Aubrey. This further supports Maya’s role as an unreliable narrator and paints Frank as the one telling the truth. However, the discrediting of Maya’s experience also has sexist undertones, shown here in the way Maya is warned against ruining men’s lives—a typical argument used to dissuade sexual assault survivors from seeking justice. This highlights Reyes’s critique of the marginalization of women’s experience and suggests there may be more credibility to Maya’s story than readers are being led to believe.

“Mental illness ran in the family like a curse, and at seventeen, Maya was right at that age when it could strike.”

This simile evokes the genre of magical realism, where supernatural elements like curses are part of everyday reality. Stylistically, this adds a sense of mystique and magic to the story. It also helps build the case that Maya’s accusations against Frank could very well stem from a mental health condition. Ultimately, this red herring shows how assumptions about Maya’s psychological state allow Frank to continue his predation unchecked.

“Within an hour of meeting her, Dr. Barry diagnosed Maya with brief psychotic disorder. Grief could bring it on. He said fears about Frank were delusional but assured her that she wasn’t the first to react with magical thinking to a death so sudden and unexpected. Less than two out of every hundred thousand people suddenly drop dead for reasons that can’t be explained by an autopsy. Some cultures blame such deaths on evil spirits. The mind will always try to explain what it can’t understand—it will make up stories, theories, whole belief systems—and Maya’s mind, Dr. Barry said, was of the type that saw faces in clouds and messages in tea leaves. Patterns where others saw none. It meant she had a good imagination—but one that could trick her.”

The role of stories and imagination is a strong theme in the novel. Maya’s imagination is a defining character trait—one that makes her a writer, but also makes her susceptible to “magical thinking” and to the effects of Frank’s hypnotism. However, this explanation for Maya’s feelings about Frank is a red herring—a misdiagnosis that leads to Maya’s Klonopin addiction, as well as Maya’s self-doubt about her perception of reality. Maya’s experience is part of Reyes’s exploration of the treatment of women’s mental health.

“It had been years since Maya had spoken to anyone of the central trauma of her life, and while she certainly hadn’t spoken of it then, she found a certain comfort in Dan’s tenderness towards Cassandra, the woman cursed to utter a truth no one would believe.”

Maya and Dan fall in love over their shared interest in Greek mythology. Dan’s interpretation of these beloved stories helps Maya see his kind-hearted nature. The motif of Myths and Fairy Tales continues throughout the novel, highlighting the power of stories in our lives.

“She’s the better swimmer, more comfortable in the water. She floats on her back, looks up at the sky, the copper amulet she wears glinting on her chest. The amulet is etched with the supposedly magic words SIM SALA BIM, though Aubrey swears she doesn’t believe in magic. She just loves it. She just wishes it were real.”

Aubrey is the more adventurous friend, comfortable in the water, while Maya is afraid to jump. But this friendship dynamic is a positive one: Aubrey encourages Maya to step outside her comfort zone. The passage also establishes Aubrey’s love of magic—her necklace has the Swedish version of the word “abracadabra”—which makes Aubrey susceptible to Frank’s hypnotism, like Maya.

“She can’t do it, but then she does. She steps tentatively forward and takes Aubrey’s hand. Together they look out over the forest, the water crashing at their feet, and then look at each other. This isn’t the first time they have done something dangerous together. But it might be the last […] They clasp their hands tighter. Raise them in the air. ‘Three!’ They yell it at the same time, then step hand in hand over the edge.”

The bond between Maya and Aubrey is one of trust and confidence in one another; Aubrey helps Maya face the world with courage and excitement. This moment is bittersweet as they cherish the last few weeks before Maya leaves for college. It’s also an example of dramatic irony, as the phrase “it might be the last” reminds readers that Aubrey really will soon be dead.

“There they see that an ordinary-looking cactus stationed in a plain plastic pot has erupted with a single dinner-plate sized flower. The long white petals yawn into the most dramatic bloom Maya has ever seen, like the gaping eye of some god or a firework frozen in time […] Carolina explains that each bud of this type of cactus only blooms for one night. This particular plant hadn’t flowered in years, and she had thought it was dead. “No lo puedo creer,” Carolina says, shaking her head in near disbelief as tears fill her eyes. The Queen of the Night, she says in Spanish, was my mother’s favorite flower.”

While in Guatemala, Maya and her family experience an almost supernatural moment of beauty following Maya’s grandmother’s funeral. The magically timed blooming of the flower is left unexplained—a moment of magical realism in the novel, accepted as part of the world’s reality. In the novel, this casual otherworldliness is confined to moments related to Jairo and his family, highlighting Maya’s Latin American cultural and literary legacy.

“While he talks, he plays absently with something in his hand. The key to his cabin—Maya recognizes the serrated edges. The key seems to bring him comfort.”

Frank uses storytelling and subtle movement with his key to induce hypnotic trances. This key is a central symbol in the novel—a demonstration of The Power of Stories and Resilience of Imagination and a marker of how easily Frank can access the ostensibly hard to reach innermost psyches of his victims.

“He saw an old bridge and a clearing on the other side of the bridge and decided to cross over, thinking he might find something there. A cabin. Help. He entered the clearing but found only the barest remains of a home: a low concrete foundation being reclaimed by forest. Frank sat down on it, pulled his knees to his chest. He prayed that his parents would find him. But they didn’t. He waited all night, shivering with cold and with fear. Then, sometime near dawn, he closed his eyes and imagined that there really were walls around him, and a ceiling above. A cozy fire. Something hot on the stove […] for the first time in months, he felt safe. Safer than he’d ever felt at home. And in the morning he wasn’t afraid anymore.”

The novel’s descriptions of Frank’s cabin are filled with echoes of fairy tales. Here, Frank’s story about a child lost in the woods after being abandoned by his parents, and a magical house that brings comfort to the lost evokes the witch’s cottage from “Hansel and Gretel.” Both stories explore children’s yearning for home and safety; but the oblique allusion is also a warning: Just like the witch’s house, which turns out to be a deadly trap for children who find it, Frank’s cabin is a cage of illusions for his victims.

“He’d carried the old story on like an heirloom, bringing it into the present by slowing it down and coloring it in with moments from the life of a boy growing up in Guatemala City. He’d woven it in like a secret. Stretched the hymn out so that, had he lived to finish it, his novel would have been one long prayer.”

When Maya revisits her father’s unfinished manuscript at age 25, her research into the poem “The Hymn of the Pearl” helps decode Jairo’s novel. Unlocking this secret also sets Maya on the right path to solving Frank’s secret and accessing her own missing memories. This quote shows the strength of Jairo’s writing and imagination, contrasting his ability to “weave the old story like a secret” into his modern prose with Frank’s more sinister weaving of memories into the minds of his victims. Maya carries Jairo’s work as an heirloom; eventually, it will lead her back to writing.

“The one she told him was her favorite, one her mom had told her when she was young. Brenda had often told it to her before bed, and like so many stories told this way, parent to child, it had taken on the quality of a fairy tale over the years, polished smooth over countless tellings.”

The House in the Pines features many fairy tale elements. Here, Brenda and Jairo’s love story becomes a fairy tale for Maya—one that is of strong importance to Maya’s identity, bridging the gap between her two cultural heritages and allowing her to see her father as a hero and artist.

“He had seemed like such a good listener, but now Maya understood that he just knew the value of a person’s stories. The ones that tell us about who we are and where we’re from. Our personal creation myths, the ones we blow out candles for every year. Maya might as well have handed Frank a key to her head and her heart the day she told him the story of her dead father.”

Frank uses Maya’s beloved story of her parents to control her because he is well versed in the power of narratives. Stories about the past and family form our identity and shape our perception of the world; playing on Maya’s Yearning for Home and regret over never meeting her father, Frank can manipulate her deepest hopes and desires.

“When she feels his hand on her shoulder, she thinks that he will lead her to the bed. And that she will go. But instead he guides her gently back down the ladder, telling her that he has something on the stove.”

The novel never fully describes Frank coercing Maya into sex while she is hypnotized, but passages like this one highlight the sexual assault she has been subjected to. Maya is essentially drugged through hypnotism and manipulated to comply with Frank’s commands. Her willingness to follow Frank to bed is not a real decision she can make. When Maya unlocks her true memory of this event, she remembers her unwillingness to comply and her inability to stop obeying. This emphasizes the traumatic abuse and manipulation Maya faces at the hands of Frank.

“What she’d forgotten was the wonder of entering Frank’s cabin for the first time, but Cristina’s painting reminded her, the loving details of the fireplace, the natural wooden beams. Somehow, though she often dreamed of it, Maya hardly remembered (while awake) how the place looked and all the thoughts that had flown through her head as she first took it in. Now the table in the painting brought back the memory of sitting across from Frank over bowls of some soup he’d made […] But Maya never tried the soup, did she? Then—as now—her father’s story leapt to mind.”

Like Maya, Cristina expresses her imagination through the arts. However, Cristina’s relationship with Frank and his cabin seems to be one of warmth and love: Her painting of Frank’s cabin carries a sense of beauty and joy. This image of Frank’s cabin sparks Maya’s memory, developing the story’s meditation on the Construction and Reconstruction of Memory and pushing Maya closer to unraveling Frank’s secret.

“She has been known, after all, to gaze out of windows rather than listening to her teachers at times and has missed many a bus stop due to daydreaming. She’s been this way since long before she met Frank. Could someone like her really blame him for lost time?”

Even before Aubrey’s death and Maya’s Klonopin addiction, Maya questions her perception of reality. Maya is a daydreamer, and her imagination has always been a strong part of her personality. Maya tries to explain her sense of lost time as a trick of imagination, highlighting the complicated psychological manipulation and doubt caused by Frank’s hypnosis.

“This is where I would come, the truest home I ever knew.”

Frank shares what seems like a vulnerable admission with Maya when she first visits his cabin. This confession draws a direct connection between Frank’s cabin and the theme of Yearning for Home in Jairo’s manuscript and “The Hymn of the Pearl.” It also illuminates Frank’s motivations: Frank describes his cabin as his true home, inspiring young women like Maya, who feel like they don’t have a place to really belong, to trust him.

“‘There is no cabin,’ she says, and as if on cue, what’s left of it dissolves and the ceilings return to sky and the floor to earth.”

When Maya unlocks her true memory of visiting Frank’s cabin, she realizes that the cabin never truly existed. This starts Maya down the path of discovering Frank’s secret—that he’s a hypnotist. This quote highlights the fragile boundary between reality and imagination—the images Frank creates are compelling and seem tangible, despite being illusory.

“I guide them back to the homes they carry inside. I help them build that space from the ground up.”

Frank knows the powerful yearning many feel for a sense of home, having experienced this himself many times growing up. Frank sees himself as a hero whose work helping people build idylls within their minds to cope with reality brings great value.

“Home would never be another world, some perfect cabin in the clouds, and Maya only hoped that if she ever made it back to where she belonged, she’d remember this.”

Maya learns this lesson at the climax of the novel, when Frank tries to kill her through hypnosis at The Whistling Pig. Jairo’s manuscript—and its idea of home as an imperfect place that requires effort to maintain—keeps Maya grounded as she tries to escape Frank’s mental grasp. This perspective on the idea of home is juxtaposed with the escapist fantasies Frank creates. Maya would rather face life’s challenges with her loved ones by her side than be in a fake paradise alone.

“‘People say it’s about the soul,’ she said, ‘about how it starts off in this other place…wherever we were before we were born, I guess. But then we’re born, and we forget about that original home, and our original parents.’ […] ‘Exactly,’ her mom said. But she said it like this was a bad thing. […], ‘I don’t agree with that. I don’t think my true home is some other place. I think it’s here.’ The words resonated with Maya on a level she couldn’t explain, as if she had said or thought them herself once.”

Maya discusses the meaning of “The Hymn of the Pearl” with Brenda. Brenda is not religious and is skeptical of the poem’s Christian message. Though Maya connects with the poem’s depiction of the longing for otherworldly homes, she fundamentally agrees with Brenda—home is here on Earth, not in the clouds. The novel’s conclusion confirms that while stories hold power and the imagination can be a beautiful place, escapism can also keep us from our true selves. True beauty comes from being present and finding joy in our day-to-day lives.

“Maybe Maya hadn’t been so far off when she called what he did to them magic. He’d waved an odd-looking key at her and she’d fallen into a trance […]. It was as if Frank had cast a spell on all of them.”

Throughout the novel, Reyes plays with magical realism and fairy tale motifs to call into question whether Frank possesses magical powers or if there is a non-magical explanation. In the end, Maya discovers that both explanations are true. Though hypnosis is a real phenomenon, the novel’s use of what is really a relaxation technique is wildly out of the realm of the possible—the idea that someone could access a person’s autonomic nervous system through their cognition fundamentally misrepresents human neurobiology.