‘Ruins’ more slasher flick than book
“The Ruins”
by Scott Smith (Knopf, 336 pages, $24.95)
It’s hard to resist comparing Scott Smith’s best-selling new novel “The Ruins” to a spectacularly gruesome car crash. Everything’s going along smoothly until it comes to a sudden, shattering halt, and then there’s just a lot of blood.
The story begins with two American couples vacationing together in Mexico. While there, they meet a German man and several Greeks, with whom they carouse, drink and relax on the beach.
In the happy-go-lucky spirit of things, the German convinces the Americans and one of the Greeks to come with him to the Mayan ruins to search for his brother, who went missing there. Though various signs and people turn up to warn them against it, they continue the search until they find themselves trapped by armed Mayans on a hill inhabited by a man-eating vine.
Up to this point, Smith’s writing is sophisticated, honest and suspenseful. He describes the characters’ emotions and relationships so deftly and with such detail that the reader feels them as though they were his own.
He also builds tension with an easy capability, making his book read like Alfred Hitchcock on paper and keeping the reader on the edge of his (car) seat. It’s perfectly creepy, tense, thrilling.
And then, suddenly, the car crashes and the book stops, transitioning abruptly from Hitchcock masterpiece to slasher flick. The characters spend the rest of the very long book being tortured, mutilated and killed by the vine, and that’s it.
While it’s creepy to see what the vine can do (hint: this is no ordinary Venus flytrap), Smith’s characters make no attempt to understand the vine – to determine what it is, the source of its powers, or why it is attacking them. The vine just is, and once there’s no more mystery, the reader’s interest in what happens to the characters dies along with them.
Smith’s writing salvages a few moments. His depiction of human interactions is still gritty, heartbreaking and real. Characters either struggle to survive or struggle to deny their situation; though the latter quickly becomes annoying (and you may even find yourself wishing for certain characters’ deaths), Smith has a gift for transporting the reader there, into the story, with them, on that hill.
He does do scary extraordinarily well; camping in the Mayan ruins will never be the same. But one only has to read the first 50 pages to grasp that. After that, the car has crashed, the story has stopped, and mostly the reader just watches the blood, waiting for the ambulance that never comes.