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Book Review: The Ruins August 22, 2008

The Ruins

Note: This is #37 in my 52 Books in 52 Weeks challenge for 2008.

I originally picked this book up based on a recommendation from another blog I read, but I'm kind of sorry I did. Belonging squarely in the "Horror" section of the bookstore, Scott Smith's The Ruins tells the story of a quartet of American college students who hook up with a couple of new friends while on vacation in Cancun, Mexico. The group decides to go looking for one member's brother, who left some time before to explore some ruins out in the jungle and hasn't been heard from yet.

Okay, I'm going to step into some slight spoiler territory now, but it's nothing you don't learn early in the book and it's necessary to really explain my opinion on Smith's creation here. When the group, almost comically unprepared for a jungle journey, fumbles their way to the ruins, they find it overgrown by a strange vine with blood red flowers. A group of Mayan villagers tries to get them to leave, but when one of the tourists inadvertently makes contact with the sprawling vines, the Mayans change their tune and force the whole group, under threat of murder, to wade through the vines and into the dig site. From there the Mayans hold them prisoner and the group is systematically terrorized, tortured, and in some cases devoured by ...the vines.

Now, it's true that The Ruins is readable. Apart from a few "Look at me, I'm just like Stephen King!" attempts at character building through flashbacks that bog the narrative down, the pacing is quick and it's hardly a challenging book. And I was pretty much constantly wanting to know what would happen next. The problem was that the concept of these teens being tormented by malicious plants possessed of a sinister intelligence is so risible that I had trouble feeling much in the way of suspense or fear. The vines don't just consume with any kind of animal instinct, they're intelligent, cunning, and purposefully mean. They can do things like mimic the sounds of hurtful conversations just for the sake of sewing discontent among their victims and recreate the smell of baking bread just to taunt their victims' hunger. The author's hand is way too visible in determining what the vines can do just so the hapless victims can be tormented. It was just silly, and worse yet there is never any payoff. You never learn why the vines are capable of what they are, why they do what they do, or why the Mayans won't let people out of their deadly thicket once they're there. Other than, of course, the author needed them to.

The other big problem I had with The Ruins was that it never elevated beyond a simple slasher pic or gore porn mentality. Sure, Smith made some interesting attempts at showing the dissolution of the various characters' relationships when exposed to life threatening duress, and it feels like he almost gets somewhere with this. But ultimately the predicament is so contrived and so bizarre that any kind of characterization in this area seems ham fisted. And Smith doesn't seem to tackle any larger themes through the examination of the tourists' predicament. There's not much about good versus evil, man versus nature, the duality of faith, the perils of self destruction, etc. etc. There are kernels of some of these ideas, but none of them bear fruit on the vine. So to speak. It's just violence for the sake of violence, and that never interests me.

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Others doing the 52-in-52 thing this week: