The House in the Pines: A Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick and New York Times bestseller - a twisty thriller that will have you reading through the night

Product Information

Frank is probably lying, but I have a new theory. Maybe Maya’s father’s book is cursed and kills everyone who reads it? Or maybe Maya’s father is the ghost murderer, killing people who look like Maya? Somehow I find it funny (in a good way) that Maya’s “for you” Youtube recommendations are the inciting incident of this book. Maya recalls (not sure if in the past or present) that her mom (Brenda) met her dad and his family on a church trip to Guatemala. Maya’s grandparents were Brenda’s host parents. Brenda and Jairo fell in love and she got pregnant, but then he died, shot by the Guatemalan army. In the 1980s, Oren Bellamy was conducting a sketchy psychological research study. He was using hypnotherapy to take over patients’ entire involuntary nervous system.

The House in the Pines by Ana Reyes | Waterstones

That said, I was not a fan of a woman lead character, once again, harboring alcohol and drug abuse. I’m extremely tired of this plot device in thrillers. It’s overdone at this point. Maya plays the bar recording for him and he finds Frank’s strangely rhythmic cadence “deeply sinister.”Stephen tells her he didn’t like Frank either. He says that Christina was an addict and he thinks that Frank was Christina’s “new drug.” Stephen also thinks Christina’s drug use damaged her heart, which might explain her death. As someone who is not a fan of paranormal mysteries and was really unhappy about the plot twist of this recent book into the paranormal, I hate to even say this, but if this book had to be a thriller, I think it would have worked better as a paranormal. It would have been scarier, and the author wouldn’t have had to work so hard at the end to convince us that murder-by-hypnosis could actually be a thing. The way the book was, it just came off to me as weird and confusing, not scary. Things That Didn’t Make Sense to Me About House in the Pines At her mom’s house, Maya finds the book her father was writing and recalls that she put it away after Aubrey’s death as she found it too upsetting to read.

The Place Beyond the Pines - Rotten Tomatoes The Place Beyond the Pines - Rotten Tomatoes

In any case, Maya is especially freaked out by the video because her best friend Aubrey also dropped dead for no apparent reason the summer before Maya went to college. On the tape, Frank says “relax your heart” and Maya is convinced that Frank made Aubrey and Cristina’s hearts stop with his hypnosis. Yes, Aubrey and Christina are possibly victims of Frank, but Maya is his main victim. That, or Maya imagined the entire thing and has major mental health issues. A waitress at the murder diner tells Maya that Christina was staring past Frank at something in the corner before she died. An empty booth. A ghost. Random Brenda POV: Brenda feels bad about sending her daughter to Dr. Barry after Aubrey died as that got her hooked on Klonopin. Also: Brenda sees that Maya was right: Frank is a murderer.Prior to becoming a mom myself, I would stay up late reading books here and there with no issue. Now I try not to read too late as I need that sleep to chase a toddler around, haha. However, I had to know how this story would end so I found myself breaking my rule and staying up to read to the end. So that’s a big endorsement there! Maya starts to pore over what she learned from Steven: Christina was going to move into Frank’s cabin, Frank has “clients,” Frank’s father was a professor. So we’re meant to think that Oren tried his hypnosis techniques on his son, Frank, who apparently learned them and used them to murder two people by causing their hearts to stop. Maya shows the Youtube video to her boyfriend, Dan. He points out that the girl who died looks like Maya. In the past, Maya is obsessed with the fact that Frank drove Aubrey home. She finds them together and is jealous. Maya and Aubrey fight. Aubrey says Frank is the one who is controlling and jealous.

House in the Pines by Ana Reyes - Publishers Weekly The House in the Pines by Ana Reyes - Publishers Weekly

Has anyone independently confirmed that Dan exists? Is he just a Klonopin hallucination? Is he real and did Maya murder him? Did Frank psychically murder him so he could have Maya all to himself? Maya was a high school senior when her best friend, Aubrey, mysteriously dropped dead in front of the older man named Frank whom they’d been spending time with all summer. After the tragedy, Maya drowns herself in alcohol and drugs to numb the pain. I love literary symbolism, but in this book it feels thrown in there haphazardly: ghosts, holy spirits/religion, nature, drugs, art, gaslighting, abuse, hypnosis. All we need is a TikTok video that makes you drop dead after watching it. Thanks for stopping by my Spoiler Discussion for the House in the Pines! A big component is that Maya has gaps in her memories of her time with Frank and what happened with Aubrey. So with that, she becomes somewhat of an unreliable narrator and the reader has to decide if what Maya is relying is actually the truth. Frank admits he had to kill Aubrey because she figured out his game AFTER he gave her a book on hypnosis. He says he “gave Cristina what she wanted” which was to die on camera.This book is REALLY invested in this murder-by-hypnosis plot. SO much of the book is intended to convince us that YES, this could actually happen IF a person is susceptible. (And that people who read a lot are susceptible!) The mystery of what happened to Aubrey and also the other woman at the diner is very interesting. While Frank is present for both deaths, there’s no evidence of any foul play by him. And no drugs or anything like that showed up during the investigations. In upstate New York, two men (Ryan Gosling, Bradley Cooper), and later, their sons (Dane DeHaan, Emory Cohen) must deal with the unforeseen consequences of their actions. Frank says he was his father’s test subject. He kept losing time. But “the student became the master.” Frank was better at hypnosis than his dad. And I liked it! While not a perfect story, there’s actually quite a bit of depth and I was so interested in where the story would go. I truly had no idea and just went along for the ride. Sometimes I think it’s more fun to be completely surprised by thrillers rather than guessing all the key reveals. What’s the Story About