The Ruins (Vintage)
by Scott Smith
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Book Summary Information
Author: Scott SmithEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-03-25
ISBN: 0307389715
Number of pages: 528
Publisher: Vintage
Product features:
- vines
- Ruins
- Scott Smith
- Cancun
- Mathias
Book Reviews of The Ruins (Vintage)
Book Review: Frustrating mix of great and bad
Summary: 3 Stars
I picked up The Ruins for two reasons: I was curious about the film version--which I haven't seen and probably won't--and I was won over by the recommendation of Stephen King, both on the cover and the more detailed review here at Amazon. The novel starts off well but, in the end, feels like Mighty Casey at the bat--a power-hitter with everything going for him... who strikes out.
The Ruins is easy to summarize. A group of four college students on vacation in Cancun meet up with a fellow tourist, a German named Mathias. Mathias's brother has disappeared into the jungle in search of an alluring woman he met on the beach, and who claimed to be working an archaeological dig inland. Mathias and his brother are due to fly home to Germany in a few days, and so he convinces the four Americans to help him find his brother. They depart, picking up another friend along the way, and when they reach what seems to be the vine-covered former site of the dig, all goes wrong. Local villagers surround and threaten them and will not allow them to leave, and there seems to be something eerie about that rustling in the leaves.
The novel's greatest strength lies in its first two-thirds--Smith grabs the reader with detail, mystery, and a dreadful sense of foreboding and won't let go. I read The Ruins in two days, which is blistering fast for a relatively slow reader like myself. Smith has an eye for detail--the parasite-covered dogs in the Mayan village managed to gross me out--and constructs his story well, building slowly from the idyllic beach life to the survivalist horror of life among the vines.
And--spoiler alert from here on out--as the vines become more and more menacing and their nature becomes more and more apparent, Smith handles it all very well. Laughing, slurping, bird-calling vines could easily have gone over the top. They didn't. While this could easily have been a cheesy case of supernatural ghost-vines or the intervention of aliens or Opus Dei or something, Smith keeps the horror firmly grounded in what feels like reality.
So how did Mighty Casey strike out? First of all, I really didn't feel much for the characters. They were only halfway developed, and some of them less than that. Smith puts off most of the character-building flashbacks until midway through the novel or even later, and at least one of them until they're in the act of dying.
Second, while Smith is obviously a gifted writer, the novel led nowhere. It signifies nothing. Six college-age tourists are trapped in the jungle, trying to survive man-eating vegetation. All right, as one of my professors used to say, so what? What weight should this story carry with the reader? Sadly--beyond a good deal of creepy atmosphere and some horrific imagery--none. The novel felt inconsequential. Six people die for nothing, with nothing to learn from their struggles or fates. Someone remarked of the film version that it felt like a "snuff picture." This is probably why.
Finally--and this is closely tied to the second strike--Smith creates fascinating premise with careful detail and has it build it into unbearable suspense, then lets it fizzle over the last hundred pages. Man-eating vines? Excellent--see what you can do with it. Unfortunately, beyond being a good way to dispose of the bodies and keep the tourists trapped, the vines serve little function other than to sow psychological discord. There is no great final conflict with the vines, in which at least some of the characters either triumph or nobly perish. Instead, they survive a little while on snack foods and rainwater and, with a few exceptions, commit suicide. The vine covers the bodies.
Over all, I still want to like this book, if only on the basis of its good points--it's strongly-written if inconsequential (a trait shared with some of the aforementioned Stephen King's work), suspenseful if ultimately fruitless, and a good two days' of reading if disappointing and frustrating.
Recommended for a rainy day.
Summary of The Ruins (Vintage)
In the wild interior of the Yucatán, far from the lazy beaches of Cancún, two young couples and some new-found friends venture to the site of an ancient Mayan temple, in pursuit of another in their group. What started out as a day trip spirals into a nightmare when they reach the ruins . . . and discover the terrifying presence that lurks there.In 1993, Scott Smith wowed readers with A Simple Plan, his stunning debut thriller about what happens when three men find a wrecked plane and bag stuffed with over 4 million dollars--a book that Stephen King called "Simply the best suspense novel of the year!" Now, thirteen years after writing a novel that turned into a pretty great movie featuring Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton, Smith is back, with The Ruins, a horror-thriller about four Americans traveling in Mexico who stumble across a nightmare in the jungle. Who better to tell readers if Smith has done it again than the undisputed King of Horror (and champion of Smith's first book)? We asked Stephen King to read The Ruins and give us his take. Check out his review below. --Daphne Durham
Guest Reviewer: Stephen King
Stephen King is the author of too many bestselling books to name here, but some of our favorites include: Cell, The Stand, On Writing, The Shining, and the entire Dark Tower series. King also received the National Book Foundation 2003 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, has had many movies and television miniseries adapted from his novels, short stories, and screenplays, and is a regular columnist for Entertainment Weekly. Keep your eyes peeled for Lisey's Story (October 2006), a new television series on TNT based on Nightmares & Dreamscapes (July 2007), and a graphic novel series based on the Dark Tower books coming from Marvel (2007). When I heard that Scott Smith was publishing a new novel this summer, I felt the way I did when my kids came in an hour or two late from their weekend dates: a combination of welcoming relief (thank God you're back) mingled with exasperation and anger (where the hell have you been?). Well, it's only a book, you say, and maybe that's true, but Scott Smith is a singularly gifted writer, and it seems to me that the twelve years between his debut--the cult smash A Simple Plan--and his return this summer with The Ruins is cause for exasperation, if not outright anger. Certainly Smith, who has been invisible save for his Academy Award-nominated screenplay for the film version of A Simple Plan, will have some 'splainin to do about how he spent his summer vacation. Make that his last twelve summer vacations.
But enough. The new book is here, and the question devotees of A Simple Plan will want answered is whether or not this book generates anything like Plan's harrowing suspense. The answer is yes. The Ruins is going to be America's literary shock-show this summer, doing for vacations in Mexico what Jaws did for beach weekends on Long Island. Is it as successful and fulfilling as a novel? The answer is not quite, but I can live with that, because it's riskier. There will be reviews of this book by critics who have little liking or understanding for popular fiction who'll dismiss it as nothing but a short story that has been bloated to novel length (I'm thinking of Michiko Kakutani, for instance, who microwaved Smith's first book). These critics, who steadfastly grant pop fiction no virtue but raw plot, will miss the dazzle of Smith's technique; The Ruins is the equivalent of a triple axel that just misses perfection because something's wrong with the final spin.
It's hard to say much about the book without giving away everything, because the thing is as simple and deadly as a leg-hold trap concealed in a drift of leaves?or, in this case, a mass of vines. You've got four young American tourists--Eric, Jeff, Amy, and Stacy--in Cancun. They make friends with a German named Mathias whose brother has gone off into the jungle with some archeologists. These five, plus a cheerful Greek with no English (but a plentiful supply of tequila), head up a jungle trail to find Mathias's brother?the archaeologists?and the ruins.
Well, two out of three ain't bad, according to the old saying, and in this case; what's waiting in the jungle isn't just bad, it's horrible. Most of The Ruins's 300-plus pages is one long, screaming close-up of that horror. There's no let-up, not so much as a chapter-break where you can catch your breath. I felt that The Ruins did draw on a trifle, but I found Scott Smith's refusal to look away heroic, just as I did in A Simple Plan. It's the trappings of horror and suspense that will make the book a best seller, but its claim to literature lies in its unflinching naturalism. It's no Heart of Darkness, but at its suffocating, terrifying, claustrophobic best, it made me think of Frank Norris. Not a bad comparison, at that.
One only hopes Mr. Smith won't stay away so long next time.--Stephen King
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