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Horror in the Yucatan
A Review by Anna Godbersen

There are not a lot of novels suspenseful enough to induce true movie-style nail biting, that demand to be read down to every last word. There are even fewer that feature real people, fully and intelligently drawn. Scott Smith's The Ruins, cinematic and possessed of a firm grip, is such a novel.

The set-up is this: Two American couples, blithe and capable, in some vague, pre-professional stage of their twenties, are vacationing in Cancun. They make friends of various nationalities (some Greeks, a German); they enjoy the sand and the sun and the beer. When they hear that the German's brother has disappeared, gone off to find some archeological site at a Mayan ruins, they volunteer to help find him, thus beginning a jovial, spirited trek into the jungle. But since this is a horror novel, every step forward seems to suggest untold danger around the corner. From the point at which Jeff and Amy and Eric and Stacy reach their destination (a dramatic green hill, under a dramatic sky) The Ruins begins to work almost mechanically, ratcheting up the stakes, tantalizing them, events moving forward with the sadistic genius of a 24 cliffhanger.

Smith is a thorough, unfussy writer. Even when the action is heavy he shifts point of view, looks into the thoughts and memories and resentments of every character. There will be all those staples of survival tales (improvisation, urine collection, mutilation, madness), but the feelings of Jeff and Amy and Eric and Stacy will always be carefully rendered. But of course. It is all those things that make them human -- their blood and semen, their voices and fears -- that whatever is out there, lurking in that fearsome landscape, wants.

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