Scott Smith The Ruins

The Ruins

Scott Smith

Knopf, Jul 2006, $24.95

ISBN: 1400043875

Four friends, who just graduated from college, go on vacation to Cancun. They enjoy the beaches and luxurious lifestyle knowing that soon they must return to their normal existence of work or grad school. The guide they hire to take them snorkeling informs them that he plans to find his missing brother using a map his sibling left him before he followed a woman to an archeological dig and never returned home.

Amy, Jeff, Eric and Stacey want to accompany Mathias when he ventures to the Mayan ruins. Locals try to chase them away, but the quartet finds the hidden path towards the archeologists. When they reach the camp, they find no one in the vicinity; but even scarier there is no avian life or even insects. All that lives is a vine that they soon learn is sentient and carnivorous. Before they can flee for their lives, the Mayans appear and refuses to let them go past the confinement barrier that has contained the vine.

This tale slowly builds up the happy atmosphere of vacationers having a great time before the next stages in their lives when abruptly the rug is pulled out from underneath the reader as the storyline turns into a Bentley Little type creepy horror thriller. Scott Smith cons the audience into thinking this is a mild youthful final fling tale, but soon turns it into a nightmare. The vine seems so innocuous that the audience and the quartet struggle to accept its malevolence yet some how Mr. Smith makes it seem real which is why readers will want to visit THE RUINS.

Harriet Klausner