Book Review: The Ruins

I remember when I was still in high school I had stumbled upon the Wikipedia page for a movie called The Ruins. I remember reading through the plot of the movie and noticed that it was based on a book.

A couple years later and I finally got my hands on the book.

The Ruins is a novel written by Scott Smith in 2006. It is about a group of four college students: Jeff, Amy, Stacy, and Eric. The four of them are on vacation and meet up with two other characters: a German named Mathias and a Greek that calls himself Pablo. Mathias’s brother Heinrich had run off to an archaeological dig site because he had fallen in love with one of the archaeologists and Mathias wants to bring him back. Jeff offers to accompany him and that is how the four end up going to the ruins.

Despite several attempts to dissuade them, the six go up to the ruins only to be forcibly quarantined up there by several Mayans after Amy stepped on some of the vines growing there. Things get worse when Pablo falls down a ravine and breaks his back while investigating the sound of a cell phone within. As time goes on, the main characters realize that the plants are sentient, malevolent, and, worst of all, possibly intelligent.

I feel that the horror of this novel comes not from the plants themselves, but from the predicament of the main characters. When you read this book, you are essentially watching the characters slowly die. The horror comes from the feeling of utter hopelessness of the characters, unable to escape from the plants due to the forced quarantine and the rising panic as the state of their injured companions worsen and provisions start running short. The reader is privy to their thoughts as some of them slowly go insane; ‘How did this go wrong?’ is a thought many people find terrifying, especially when a simple mistake leads to a nightmarish fate.

The characters are not particularly special, though that may be the point; to show the horror that ordinary people feel when confronted by something terrifying and having no way to get away. There are brief moments when they engage in activities more often seen in bad “horror” films like arguing about supposed infidelity or just complaining about whose fault it is that they’re stuck on a hill filled with monstrous plants, but the book makes it very clear that the reason they’re acting like that is that the sheer amount of panic and despair they’re feeling is making them crazy; this is something that is conveyed better in books where readers can get more intimate with the inner workings of the characters’ minds.

The plants themselves are a rather twisted creation, giving readers all sorts of body horror such as devouring flesh or growing vines inside of their victims’ bodies. Their most notable ability is to mimic the sounds they hear and often use them to seemingly taunt the humans and further break their already fragile psyches. It is never explained how the plants seemingly became intelligent or how they can mimic sound; there is even a throwaway comment by Jeff that maybe the things on the hill aren’t even plants at all. In this case, the mystery works; though they are rather frightening, the real horror is the effect they have on the main characters.

I have not seen the movie version so I cannot offer an opinion on it. I will say, however, that the book makes for a good read. It might not be pleasant, but it does deliver on the horror, a horror that comes from watching what should be perfectly normal healthy people slowly waste away, go insane, and dragged into the embrace of death screaming and choking through mouths that have vines growing out of them.