The Ruins

A complete load of crap! About as scary as tangling your foot in a vine, and just as annoying. This pathetic excuse for horror generates most of its effect by the sheer horror of the rubbish that gets published, BOUGHT and then MADE INTO A MOVIE! I enjoyed Scott Smith's A Simple Plan, although I thought it was laboured. This is just painful: a “horror” story about a few spoiled and unlikeable American jerks who go off to a remote place and get trapped by–da-dah–killer plants! the interior monlogues are laughably facile and superficial, and there is about as much excitement as in a large serving of blancmange. A tedious, lame, dull and awful piece of rubbish. I threw the book away!

This isn't a horror book that has any characters you can get emotionally attached to or care for, which really didn't work for me. The woman-identifying characters were incredibly one dimensional and clearly written by a dude. Though to be fair, all of the characters were one dimensional.

The most interesting part was the last 25% of the book and even then, the ending kind of made me roll my eyes. However if you like bleak endings, this one is for you.

I think this was pretty well written, but not my cup of tea at all. The buildup was adroitly done - creating a background of banal normalcy, yet with lots of good creepy details to set the tone. But, once the characters got to the crisis point, and realized what their situation was, I just didn't care anymore. Without giving too much away, the story is quite obviously hopeless, and I have trouble getting involved in such a case.