What do You think about The Ruins (2006)?
This review contains no spoilers, no specifics, just generalities.I have nothing good at all to say about this book, one of the worst stinkeroos I've ever had the misfortune to stumble across. I can't believe it was ever even published. It's junk like this that make me feel that no matter how bad my writing is, if drivel like this can earn money, than there is no reason why anything I slap together can't make money.Horror story? Nope. Didn't scare me one bit. Didn't even make me uneasy. Extended character study? Yep. But did it make me care about a single character? Nope. Maybe it was the author's intent to people his novel with an entire cast of throw-away characters. If so, then the book was a raging technical success.Strangely, the movie trailer does look good compared to the book. This is surely a case where the movie has to be better than the book. The only other example of this I ever found was the movie Excalibur. Great movie, bad book. (20+ years later, I'm still not convinced that the duo Gil Kane and John Jakes could write their way out of a paper bag, although John Jakes did a fine job with North and South. Kane must've been the limiting facter in Excalibur.) There are two reasons why I finished it: 1. Instead of actually reading a book, I mostly listen to books on tape, and I have a very hard time finding stuff at libraries that I want to listen to (can't afford to buy/rent books on tape). I usually end up listening to books of which I would never have read the hard copy. 2. Everything about the story was so bad that I naively thought there had to be a gold nugget hidden somewhere because, after all, the stupid thing WAS published. I kept thinking that the next chapter would take off like a literary rocket and the auther would finally deliver on the promise made by the praise heaped on the silly thing on the cover. Never happened. Nunca.Wait... I just thought of something good to say. All aspiring writers should be encouraged, even emboldened, by this terrible little novel whose only horror lies in its horrible failure. Truly, if this is all it takes to make a name for oneself and to get a movie deal, then dazzling success is just right around the corner for all of us.I'd love to hear from someone who liked this book. Anyone. Maybe they can explain to me what I missed in about 10 hours of listening.
—Regina
Some people are going to think I rated this too low, but supernatural suspense thrillers are not my game so it loses a star just for that. As its type though, it's pretty damn good. An in depth review would reveal too much to the potential reader, so let's just say once you get started it will be hard to put down.The bogeyman in this sort of story is irrelevant, werewolves, rabid dogs, zombies, it's all the same. Pick one and get on with it. There's one here, and while not the most original, it's effective especially when given a twist. Clark Ashton Smith and William Hope Hodgson wrote stories using this particular trope way long ago.The real trick in a novel like this is developing characters, even more than a plot, this book is character driven and Smith is great at getting in the heads of these people in a believable way. And we care about them even as the body count starts to mount. He actually gets to some deep issues about faith, fear, and the nature of death. We become empathetic, we get inside each character. Smith also does a good job of not making one of the characters an obvious "bad guy" in the group, too selfish, too bossy, etc. This leaves the bogeyman and his friends free to ravage our little jungle clan here and not reveal who's going to get it in what order and who (if anyone) survives. They all matter to us about equally.Interestingly there aren't really any ruins in it, so don't be expecting some hidden cursed Mayan Temple to appear, it remains hidden in the jungle in some other novel.I liked it and had a fun time reading it.
—Randolph Carter
Scott Smith’s wrote one of my favorite crime novels with A Simple Plan that released in 1993. Thirteen years later came his second book, The Ruins, which instantly became one of my favorite horror novels. I’ve got my fingers crossed that sometime later this decade he’ll write another one and maybe it’ll turn out to be the greatest sci-fi epic I’ve ever read. The concept here is dirt simple. Idiots go somewhere they shouldn’t and bad shit happens. In this particular case four American college students, two boy-girl couples, are on vacation in Mexico where they meet several other tourists from all over the world. A German named Mathis tells them that his brother got smitten with a woman and followed her to an archaeological dig in the jungle, and that he needs to retrieve him before their flight home. The Americans and another Greek fellow decide to join him and set out on an impromptu adventure following a hand drawn map to a remote location.A bunch of unprepared and ill-equipped tourists wander off into the jungle? What could possibly go wrong?After they find themselves trapped on a hilltop, the young people struggle against something almost beyond belief as they endure thirst, hunger and injuries and have to consider extreme actions in order to survive. The sub-title of this book could almost be A Series of Bad Decisions, and that’s one of the aspects that made it unique for me. A lot of horror is based around punishing people for their actions. Frankenstein gets his monster for daring to try to change the natural order. Jason slaughters teenagers for acting like teenagers. In The Ruins there is no single moment of arrogance or failure of character to point out as the thing that bring about the situation. (Although there are plenty of small examples of rotten behavior that make it that much worse.) Rather it’s just the sunny optimism that everything will be OK that puts these kids in a leaky canoe headed up that fabled Shit Creek with no paddles. Smith does a great job of playing off the human nature of being in a bad spot and then wondering how you got there only to have the sickening realization that you knew for a while that you heading into trouble but you somehow talked yourself into staying the course it with the assumption that everything would work itself out.The characters themselves are a departure from what you get in most horror novels these days. Yeah, I know some people hated them, and they truly are a pack of insufferable dumb asses for a large part of the book. But I think what some readers really didn’t like about them was that they did act the way most of us would in those circumstances. For example, Jeff tries to play the hero, and while you can empathize with his frustrations with the others, he’s also being a complete douche bag for not acknowledging the bigger picture and the others also act with varying amounts of denial and panic.What’s interesting is that there are no easy answers as to how they should be behaving. (Serious spoilers here.) (view spoiler)[Jeff’s insistence on amputating Pablo’s legs and trying to convince the others to eat the corpse of another illustrates that you can make a bad situation worse by trying to do the right thing. On the other hand, sitting around and drinking tequila is criminally irresponsible on the part of Amy, Eric and Stacy. (hide spoiler)]
—Kemper
