Have you ever been so enthralled by a book you couldn’t put it down? Hours pass and the world seems to fade away as the story lulls you into a trance-like state. This is precisely the effect of Ana Reyes’ spellbinding debut The House in the Pines, a New York Times bestseller and January 2023 Reese’s Book Club Pick.
The novel follows Maya Edwards, a 25-year-old Guatemalan American in Boston who, after graduating college, finds herself adrift. When we meet Maya, she’s working a dead-end job at a garden center and suffering from Klonopin withdrawal. She lives with her law student boyfriend, Dan, who is loving and supportive but doesn’t know about her addiction, which started when a doctor prescribed the medication to help Maya cope with the sudden death of her best friend, Aubrey.
One night, during a bout of insomnia, Maya stumbles onto a YouTube video of her ex-boyfriend, Frank Bellamy. In the video, Frank sits next to a young woman at a diner in their hometown of Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Then, out of nowhere, the woman falls out of a booth and dies on camera. The medical examiner reports the incident as a “sudden unexplained death”—the same fate that befell Aubrey seven years ago. Maya believes Frank is responsible for both deaths and returns home on a mission to prove her theory, a quest that will force her to confront her past.
This is the mystery that lies at the heart of The House in the Pines. Yet the book is not a traditional mystery novel. In fact, one of the novel’s many delights is how it blends, and ultimately transcends, genre, mixing elements of suspense, thriller, and magical realism. The story thus transports the reader into a world where verisimilitude and fantasy coexist.
In alternating chapters that move through time, between now and the events leading to Aubrey’s death, we get the sense that the past is an ever-present absence haunting Maya. This is, in part, because Reyes writes the backstory in present tense, while the primary story is narrated in past. In the hands of a lesser writer this might confuse readers, but here it works because as each story unfolds it propels the plot of the other forward, accruing layers of textured meaning in the process. In this way, the novel’s structure reflects its theme of the past and present as inextricably linked.
Reyes further develops this theme through her skillful use of mise en abyme, the technique of writing a story within a story. Like a set of matryoshka dolls, the reader finds a fictional novel embedded within the real novel that provides clues to understand the story’s outer layer. Maya’s father, who died in Guatemala before she was born, has left behind an unfinished manuscript, titled Olvidé que era hijo de reyes, “I forgot I was the son of kings”—a playful nod to the author’s own surname. Maya translates the 47 pages into English but is left searching for its hidden meaning. “But on some other level,” she says, “the language remains coded, as the story it tells is symbolic of a deeper story just beneath the surface.” Is this Maya discussing her father’s novel or Reyes’ metacommentary on the book in our hands, or both? Either way, Maya’s quest to piece this puzzle together serves as a poignant metaphor for her search for identity and home.
All the formal experimentation aside, what really elevates The House in the Pines is its prose. In passages where the narrator describes places, real and imagined, Reyes is always beautifully attuned to sensory detail. From the very first pages, a fireplace in the titular house has a “burning-pine smell that sweetens to the smell of perfume, then softens to the smell of your mother’s coat.” The house comes into view, as if sight were an olfactory sense. Later, when Maya and her mother, Brenda, visit her late father’s home in Guatemala, they witness a cactus with a “dinner-plate-sized flower” with “long white petals [that] yawn into the most dramatic bloom . . . like the gaping eye of some god or firework frozen in time.” The image is arresting, and poetic crumbs like this are sprinkled throughout.
While some reviewers found the story’s ending implausible, their literal reading of the plot misses the extent of Reyes’ literary gifts. The novel asks big questions—about trauma’s effect on memory, the psychological toll of gaslighting, the possibility of healing and reconciliation—while working within and beyond the boundaries of genre. At its core, the novel is about one woman’s journey to find and accept herself, and in the process, discover her voice as an artist. In that sense, this coming-of-age tale is universal and timeless.
It’s hard to believe The House in the Pines clocks in at over 300 pages, since I breezed through it in a single day. To me, that’s a sure sign of well-crafted storytelling. But apart from its zippy pacing, the book had me invested in the characters of Pittsfield. By the end, I found myself wanting to spend more time with Maya—and Aubrey and Brenda and Dan. I miss them already.
The House in the Pines by Ana Reyes, Dutton, $18
Zach Shultz is a current MFA Candidate in Creative Writing at Louisiana State University. He is an editorial assistant for The Southern Review, a former nonfiction editor for New Delta Review, a 2019 Lambda Literary nonfiction fellow, and a 2022 Indiana University Writers’ Conference fiction fellow. His work has appeared in Lit Hub, Electric Literature, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.