The Ruins
 RRP £6.99 Lowest New Price £2.02 
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Corgi Books Number of pages: 432 Language: English (Original Language) Language: English (Unknown) |
Two young American couples are enjoying a vacation in Cancun, and make friends with Mathias, a German tourist. He and his brother Heinrich had been travelling together, and the latter has disappeared while investigating Mayan ruins with a woman friend. Mathias, concerned over the disappearance of his brother, persuades his tourist friends to help him track down his brother with the aid of a hand-drawn map the latter had left behind. After a punishing journey, the group come to a Mayan village where they encounter a distinctly unfriendly welcome. Leaving the village, they stumble across a hillside festooned with beautiful red flowers. But a Mayan is following them with a gun, and soon a body is encountered, shot full of arrows. As the above might indicate, this is by no means standard thriller territory, and Smith continues to defeat any expectations that readers might bring to his books. After a deceptive start, this turns into a much darker book than A Simple Plan, and actually defies comparisons to the earlier work, so distinctive is this new one. Readers are used to being taken on terrifying journeys, but this one is a humdinger.
RRP: £6.99
Editorial
Amazon.co.uk Review
Of course, having an excellent film adapted from a book doesn't hurt its sales. But Scott Smith's A Simple Plan was, in its own right, a remarkably assured crime novel with strongly drawn characters and plotting that many another author would kill for. The art of generating suspense with the written word is not easily acquired, but Smith is a master. And now we have The Ruins, to prove that Smith is no one-trick pony. A decade may have passed since his debut novel, but Smith has not lost an iota of his storytelling panache.
--Barry Forshaw
Pure Terror
Review date: 2008-11-10 Rating: 10 out of 10
what a book!!!, i had never heard of scott smith before i read this and i only picked this up on my way to the counter at the library. i could not put the book down, it was addictive. simply, a horrible tale, that will stay with you long after you have read it. i can't wait to read his other book.
Reviews
A book that grabs you (in more ways than one!!)
Review date: 2008-09-20 Rating: 8 out of 10
I do think the negative reviews of this novel are incredibly unfair. I read a wide range of genres, with horrors and thrillers being among my favourites. I will say at the outset that I haven't read a Simple Plan, and it may well be that many people who didn't rate The Ruins had read this first and expected a similar story. It's certainly not a book in the same genre as Silence of the Lambs and, to this extent, the cover blurb is misleading and, again, could set readers up for disappointment. So, let's just take this novel as a stand alone work which straddles the horror genre more than any other ... to this extent, it really does deliver. At first I thought the writing was somewhat simplistic (I'd say for the first couple of chapters). However, once the story proper started, it's clear that Scott Smith is an incredibly adept writer, building pace, tension and character almost pitch-perfectly. It is some feat to write a novel and set it in one location with six main characters (one of whom is unconscious for most of the novel) and still retain a reader's interest - in fact it did more than retain my interest, it had me turning the pages eager to find out what would happen next. It is claustrophobic, brooding, menacing and intriguing. Yeah it's `far fetched' if you want to argue that no vines like this actually exist - but did I believe it could be true? Yes. After all, tales of werewolves and vampires also require us to suspend our disbelief, as do Michael Crichton's offerings which are similarly `believably far fetched'. And as a horror, this is also great fun - it's what you want out of a novel; something that keeps you flicking the pages and thinking, `I'm really enjoying this'. Of course the main characters were somewhat shallow - they're young people and acted as people their age would; but they certainly weren't one dimensional and each character was different. To sum up, if you want a deep insight into Mayan culture, read a guidebook. If you want books that exactly echo reality, then steer clear of the horror genre entirely. But if you want a good read with an interesting premise, then The Ruins does the job incredibly well.
Nightmares don't come more brutal or claustrophobic than this
Review date: 2008-08-26 Rating: 8 out of 10
The Ruins by Scott Smith is an out-and-out tale of horror which solely focuses on the fatal journey that a group of young friends take into the jungles of the Yucatan.
It's a direct, simple tale that rushes along at a lightning-fast-pace and left me turning each page hoping to find some good news for the group of friends only to find an already horrible situation worsen progressively. There's nothing original about the group of holiday-makers featured in the book but it didnt lessen my enjoyment of what I found to be a highly enjoyable & genuinely disturbing horror novel.
It should come as no surprise that if you're not a fan of the horror genre, the chances are you'll find more at fault with The Ruins than you will find good. If you are a fan however, I'd recommend picking a copy up as it's refreshingly simple & although the "horror" itself is very far-fetched, I found the realism of how a group of friends would react to events a joy to read. Not once did I find myself thinking "Bad move, why did you do that" as I do most horror novels and more so movies.
On the negative side, I did find the actual idea of what's causing so much terror quite hard to buy-into and the fact that the vast majority of the book takes place in exactly the same location a little tedious toward the latter half of the 509 pages. The characters were hard to empathise with but this is a horror story after all and I expected no different.
Overall this is an enjoyable, doom-filled tale taking a group of friends totally out of their comfort zone and placing them smack-bang in the middle of a nightmare. It's rare that I really find it hard to put a book down but I can honestly say that The Ruins had me hooked from it's first to it's very last page. Gripping stuff
brilliant book
Review date: 2008-07-25 Rating: 10 out of 10
what a great book ! im an reading it for the second time in a year and it still has me spell bound. cant really see how the film will go as most of the book describes the thoughts and feelings of the group - although there is enough action to keep fans of that genre interested. not that much really happens actually despite the size of the book but i still find it hard to put down.keep me guessing until the very end.
deary, deary me...
Review date: 2008-07-21 Rating: 4 out of 10
This book has more padding than substance; within thirty or so pages you realise it's actually a (very slight) short story. Less fun than Gardeners Question Time.
Turgid.
Product Details/Specifications
Authors:
Scott B Smith
Recording label: Corgi Books
Manufacturer: Corgi Books
EAN: 9780552152709
Binding: Paperback
ISBN: 0552152706
Number of pages: 432
Publication date: 2007-08-01
Language: English (Original Language)
Language: English (Unknown)
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