The Ruins

There might not be a better psychological thriller than Scott Smith’s A Simple Plan, and the movie version of it was almost as good. The way Smith weaved a great story with characters losing trust in their loved ones, justifying ways to screw over their loved ones in the pursuit of money, was nothing short of fantastic.

That’s why, when I heard Smith had a new book out called The Ruins, I got pretty excited about it. And when I landed a free copy of it – hey, even better.

Turns out the fact that the book was free was one of the better aspects of it. (Zing!) Seriously, though – it’s a major disappointment in almost every conceivable way for me.

First and foremost, this is a horror novel. Which is a genre I barely ever read, with the only exception I can think of being Stephen King. And perhaps, therefore, I came in with unreasonable expectations – I was looking for a psychological thriller, and I got a horror story instead.

But in the end, a story is a story is a story, right? It should be compelling no matter what – it’s why I loved the Lord of the Rings trilogy even though the fantasy genre sort of gives me hives. It’s why I didn’t mind Ender’s Game, even though I absolutely never read science fiction.

At the end, The Ruins just didn’t work at all for me. Unlike a lot of other books on my list which I didn’t like, though, I did finish this book – mostly because I wanted to see if there was a clever way Smith was going to wrap it up.

Presumptively, The Ruins is about four friends (two couples) on a trip in Mexico. They meet several people, including a German named Mathias, who they soon learn is distraught because his brother Heinrich left the hotel to find a girl he met on the beach. She’s drawn a hand-written map to some ruins that she and her fellow archeologists are working on, and Heinrich copied it down for Mathias. The group, which includes a guy named Pablo who speaks no English, travels out the ruins on a daytrip.

And of course, that’s where everything goes wrong. The setup here is actually pretty good, and Smith does a good job of showing us that this gang is walking into a disaster and doesn’t see it. He teases around showing us the source of the evil – the villain, if you will – without pulling the curtain back too much, until the story truly requires it. But then…the story sort of goes nowhere. Not only is the source of evil pretty silly, but none of the characters are very likeable. In fact, most of them are pretty unlikable…which is a problem if the reader wants to care about their present situation. And the conclusion of the book is pretty much the obvious ending to a story like this – which was a disappointing capstone to a disappointing book. A shame.

Rating: 4.5/10.0