The House in the Pines

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 8

Chapters 9-16

Chapters 17-24

Chapters 25-30

Chapters 31-38

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Background

Genre Context: Psychological Thrillers

The genre of psychological thriller relies on characters whose perceptions are at odds with reality, creating suspense about what is really going on. Common tropes of the genre include standard elements of mystery such as red herrings, and more philosophical concerns about the subjective nature of reality, which can easily be distorted or falsely constructed, and unreliable narrators whose substance use disorder or mental health conditions complicate the reader’s trust. For example, the 2015 novel The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins, features a protagonist whose alcoholism fragments her memories, preventing her attempts to solve the mystery of a local missing woman.

The House in the Pines features many classic tropes of the psychological thriller genre. Maya is an unreliable narrator; her mental health and addictions to Klonopin and alcohol often distort reality. There are several central mysteries: the unexplained sudden deaths of Maya’s best friend Aubrey and Pittsfield artist Cristina, as well as the mystery surrounding Frank, who likes to lure young women out to a beautiful house in the woods. There are many red herrings as Maya searches for answers.

However, Reyes also subverts genre tropes. In particular, her handling of the unreliable narrator becomes a critique of societal treatment of women’s mental health and the discrediting of women‘s experience. The novel’s conclusion reveals that Maya has actually been an extremely reliable narrator, but her experiences are dismissed by those around her. While this social gaslighting makes Maya question her perception of reality—and makes readers question her reliability—in the end Maya proves her credibility.

Literary Context: Portrayals of Women’s Mental Health in Literature

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was common for women to be diagnosed with “hysteria,” a since-debunked catchall that pathologized any behavior that was inconvenient or in defiance of patriarchal control. Women were often labeled as “hysterical” for expressing their perspective and experiences, leading to the long-held and false assumption that women are predisposed to mental illness. This belief found its way into literature, leading to characters such as Bertha Rochester in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (1847).

At the same time, there is a long history of literature condemning and exposing the harm of Victorian treatment of women’s mental health. Most famous today is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 psychological horror short story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” in which a woman confined to her room for “a slight hysterical tendency” and forbidden to write by her physician husband experiences a psychotic break due to isolated imprisonment (Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. “The Yellow Wallpaper.” National Institutes of Health.gov, p. 648).

The landmark 1979 feminist literary critique The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar examined the common trope of the “madwomen” in Victorian literature—women portrayed as “monstrous” and marginalized for deviating from strict gender norms—reading the maligned character of Bertha Rochester against the novel’s original grain.

The House in the Pines follows this feminist tradition of critiquing society’s marginalization of women. There are parallels between Gilman’s unreliable female narrator, whose mental health only starts to deteriorate as a symptom of her treatment, and Maya’s diagnosis with “brief psychotic disorder” (21) in The House in the Pines to explain away her accusations against Frank. Maya’s mental health only truly deteriorates when she is disbelieved. Though the association between women and “hysteria” has long been discredited, women’s reporting of their experience is still often doubted—a reality that underpins Reyes’s novel.

Literary Context: Magical Realism and Fairy Tales

The House in the Pines is a work of magical realism that also includes elements of fairy tales to create its slightly dreamy atmosphere at the junction of imagination and reality. These influences also represent Maya’s cultural heritage: Magical realism is most famous from the Latin American literary tradition, while the fairy tales referenced in the novel are of European origin.

While realism explores the everyday, with a focus on ordinary characters and the nitty-gritty details of their lives, magical realism introduces supernatural elements into the mundane world, blurring the boundaries between magic and reality, often to portray the surreal effects of generational trauma, national calamity, or other world-altering upheavals. Magical realism is most often associated with the work of such authors as Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, Chilean novelist Isabel Allende, and Mexican screenwriter Laura Esquivel—as well as many other writers not from Latin America.

In magical realism, the supernatural is treated as just another part of everyday life. This differs from fantasy, which portrays magical worlds as distinctly separate from our everyday existence. In magical realism, characters do not perceive the magical elements of their world as fantastical, but simply treat them as mundane facts of life devoid of wonder or surprise. This approach allows magical realism to challenge strict rationalism, often associated with Western ideology. In The House in the Pines, Maya’s connection to Guatemala relies on magical realism, which her father studied as a literature student. His unfinished manuscript—in the magical realism genre—helps Maya solve the mystery of Aubrey’s death. In the novel, magical realism represents Maya’s vivid imagination and the way she carries on her father’s legacy as a Latin American writer.

Fairy tales, a genre that began as oral tradition, are found across cultures. They carry warnings and lessons about life passed down through generations. Fairy tales often take place in distant lands and times, and usually begin with an incantatory phrase (in English, this is “once upon a time”; other languages have different repeated introductions). In the 19th century, the German linguists and nationalists now known as the Brothers Grimm collected folk tales, rewrote many in accordance with Christian values, and published them. Some of the most recognizable European fairy tales come from these collections. However, later writers, such as 19th-century Danish author Hans Christian Andersen and 17th-century French author Charles Perrault, also wrote in the folk tale genre, creating equally well-known stories.

The House in the Pines echoes several fairy tale motifs. The setting of the mysterious cabin in the woods and its ability to trap Maya references the witch’s cottage in the “Hansel and Gretel” story. Like these children, abandoned in the woods and preyed on by a cannibalistic witch, Maya must overcome life-threatening danger in the woods and find her way home. Frank also makes use of this story—his invented origin for the cabin is also based on a child being left alone in the forest. The novel’s antagonist Frank has elements in common with the monstrous husband from the story Bluebeard. Like the murderous Bluebeard, who lures successive wives to his home, gives them a mysterious key to a room they must never open, and then murders them, Frank uses a key to hypnotically lure several women to his nonexistent cabin and murders them when they recover their memories.

Together, the literary influences of magical realism and fairy tales create a whimsical and lyrical tone in the novel, while conveying important themes about Maya’s personal journey.