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“The Ruins” by Scott Smith follows a group of young friends holidaying on the beaches of Cancun. However, their vacation takes a dark turn when they get trapped in a Mexican jungle after stepping into a forbidden enclosure. The local Mayans surround them with guns, ensuring they can’t leave.
I found out about “The Ruins” only recently while reading a horror comic called “Evil Cast” and decided to order it online because Stephen King has some great things to say about it. “Better than any suspense novel since The Silence of the Lambs” reads the cover of the edition, quoting King’s praise for the work.
All the primary protagonists of the story are young people, four of whom are Americans, looking to have some fun before they start college. There’s Jeff and Amy, both medical students who are dating each other, as well as Amy’s best friend Stacy and her boyfriend Eric, who plans to become a teacher. These four befriend a young German tourist called Mathias, and they decide to go with him to the site of a remote Mayan ruins to look for Mathias’ brother, who left a girl to go there and hasn’t come back. A young cheery Greek called Pablo, who doesn’t even speak English, but often hangs out with them, also joins them on their quest.
So, “The Ruins” is about a holiday gone deadly wrong for six youngsters who set out in the morning for a Mexican jungle, hoping to have a fun day hiking, reuniting their friend with his brother, and returning to the beaches by night. In-fact, the novel is like an elaborate survival story version of H.G. Wells’s short horror story ‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’. That story was about carnivorous plants that attack humans and Scott Smith takes that concept to another level.
The author spins a tense tale, with easy-to-read language, with an omniscient narrator who takes us through the journey of these youngsters trying to survive under the harsh Mexican sun with little food and water, hoping that a search party would eventually save them from the jungle and the hostile Mayans. The character Jeff is sort of the lead protagonist of the story, who keeps coming up with plans and ideas to find out a way to survive as long as possible and maybe find their way out of the horrifying situation they’ve got themselves into. But despite his leadership qualities, Jeff seems to suffer from the ‘saviour complex’ and his actions are often driven by the need to keep himself occupied and sane, rather than the benefit of his friends. Matthias is probably the only likable character in the six-people group, and it’s mostly because he is the quiet one, who keeps to himself, is practical in his outlook and supports Jeff in most of his decisions.
The girls, Amy, and Stacy, often seem like two mildly different versions of the same person. The only major difference between the two girls (if you don’t count their physical appearance) is the fact that Amy often complains about things. The only reason Stacy isn’t as whiny is that she spaces out easily and, as a result, doesn’t care too much about what is happening around her. So, Stacy is like Amy on feel-good drugs.
For a book titled “The Ruins”, the author cleverly manages to not give readers any historical background about the place at all, unless you count a few conversations between the friends who only have theories about what is happening to them. For readers who like the freedom to imagine and draw their own conclusions, this aspect could be a plus point, but for others who expect a cohesive explanation, things get disappointing.
Many of the scares in “The Ruins” hinge on body horror, so there are plenty of graphic and gory descriptions of mangled body parts. The psychological manifestation of the experience is much milder than you’d expect. While the novel wasn’t exactly unputdownable for me, it did keep me invested until the end, and I took my own time reading it, although the book surprisingly isn’t divided into chapters. Towards the end, the evil foliage gets ridiculously malevolent, in ways that were unintentionally hilarious instead of being creepy. I mean, sure, reading supernatural horror fiction demands that readers suspend logic and reasoning, but even after doing that, some things are too far-fetched – for example, the way they are eventually portrayed, the creepy plants could easily embody a character from “Mean Girls”. That’s as far as I would go to spoil the novel for you.
Overall, it’s a gripping book for horror-thriller fans, if you haven’t already read too many stories in the same genre. Because “The Ruins” came out in 2006 and can seem a little outdated in its character development and depictions.
Rating: 3.5 on 5.
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