Number 14 - The Ruins - Scott Smith

 

My regular readers may remember that I reviewed A Simple Plan at about this time last year, also by Scott Smith, and thought it was an amazing book. It was the on the strength of that that I bought this one.

And I wasn't disappointed in the slightest.  This is a horror story par excellence. 

A group of friends holidaying in Mexico go on a day trip, looking to find the brother of one of their new friends who went looking for an archeological dig and hasn't returned yet.

In the depths of the jungle they stumble across a hill covered in strange red flowers and vines. Suddenly a group of natives appear and order them away. When one of the friends steps into the vines, events take the first of many dark turns.

The sense of dread builds rapidly and never really falters. From the moment they find themselves on the hillside we know that this is going to be a full on nightmare. Smith has built the characters nicely in the preamble to reaching the hill and we care about what might (or will) happen.

The quality of the writing means the suspension of disbelief required for the story is never an issue, as wild and fantastical as the events become in the last two hundred pages, we're so mired in this story that we accept it. He's careful to throw things at us in stages, giving us a steady reveal of quite how bad a situation they've found themselves in. Every time we think things can't get worse...

He switches viewpoints frequently between 4 of the 6 stuck on the hillside. It's possible to argue that they made silly decisions at times, but we're far enough inside the characters' heads to understand why they did the things they do. These are brilliantly realised normal people stuck in an insane situation. We know that these people are in a horror story.  They don't. They're going to make mistakes.

There are some errors in the book.  But they're almost certainly down to the publisher and not the author. In some German speech the English word "Two" is used consistently instead of the German "Wo". 

The thing that bugs me most about this book is that it's described in the reviews on the cover as a Suspense Novel, and not a horror story.  Even The Stephen King quote shies away from the word. Two of the internal reviews call it what it is, but it's disappointing that the others don't. It's not a shameful thing for a book to be a horror story, especially not when it's this damned good.

This is a scary, tense and brilliant horror novel. I just wish Scott Smith would write more books.  He's one of the best out there. Every bit as good as Stephen King at his best.