Review of 'The Ruins' by Scott Smith

Have just finished reading the most-hyped horror novel of 2006: The Ruins by Scott Smith. The novel had created a lot of buzz in publishing circles last summer due to a combination of factors. Smith's debut was with the hugely-successful thriller A Simple Plan in 1993 and he had published nothing after that till now. So expectations were already high for his follow-up effort. Then a number of famous authors and reviewers - including Stephen King - weighed in with very favourable reviews of The Ruins and all that pre-release publicity also ensured that there was more than average interest in this new work.
The Ruins reads very much like something King himself would have written in his leaner and meaner younger days. The story begins innocently enough: a bunch of spoiled American youngsters - Jeff, Eric, Amy and Stacy - are on a lazy vacation in Mexico. On a whim, they decide to help a fellow tourist - a dour German - find his brother, who has run away to an archeological dig in the jungle with a girl. The tourists are accompanied by a cheerful Greek.
The six of them follow the map given by the missing German and reach a Mayan village. There is something suspicious in the villagers' behaviour. The tourists spot a beautiful hillside which is covered by a vine which has bloodred flowers. Then, suddenly, one of the girls makes a wrong move and then all hell breaks loose. There is something terrible on that hillside ...
What follows in the next 300 pages is classic horror - bleak, horrifying, creepy and, in some passages, extremely gory. The reader has to suspend his disbelief to enjoy the story's twists and turns but once he/she has done that, there are lots of payback here for the horror-story fan. One interesting plot device Smith uses is the absence of any chapters - this means that there is no let-up in the story once you have started. It is one straight rollercoaster of a literary ride. Though there is nothing particularly new in the scenario - it is the well-worn "trapped in the wilderness with danger all around" plot line - it is Smith's writing style and simple prose that drives the reader on. There are no extensive descriptions but the reader still gets a claustrophobic feeling of the desperate situation the tourists have landed themselves into. The enemy is something very familiar to all of us but in a twisted way ...
One disappointment for me are the unimaginative dialogues - for instance, a lot of the characters seemed to be saying "Are you ok?" to each other every now and then, when things were evidently not ok - but overall Smith's prose is smooth, clean and uncomplicated. There is a "nice" twist at the very end, though the most perceptive readers can see that coming a long way back.
One criticism of The Ruins is that this is a short story that has been padded up into a medium-length book. Not really - the real horrors here happen well into the book and that kind of build-up is difficult to maintain in a short story. Another criticism is that none of the characters are particularly likeable ... there is some merit in this argument but that shouldn't prevent the enjoyment of this fine "chiller".
There is something very visual in The Ruins and so no one will be surprised to hear that actor Ben Stiller's company has already snapped up the film rights. Smith himself is said to be in charge of the screenplay. (He himself had done the screenplay for the Hollywood treatment of A Simple Plan in 1998). That is one movie adaptation that will have horror fans drooling if it finally makes it to the big screen. I, for one, can't wait to watch it!