Jeff, Amy, Eric, and Stacy have graduated college and are on a celebratory vacation in Cancun. They tan, read magazines, go snorkeling, befriend foreigners, have sweaty sex in the afternoons and get drunk at night. The trip is nice, but also kind of ... well, dumb, you know? And after a week it's even becoming a little dull. That's why, when a German acquaintance named Mathias shows Jeff a hand-drawn map to a remote archeological dig, Jeff, a former Eagle Scout, jumps at the chance to provide a little adventure for his gripey, mollycoddled friends, a chance to see the real Mexico.
This is the setup to Scott Smith's fine new horror-suspense novel, The Ruins, and readers are correct if they already spot lots of similarities to Alex Garland's The Beach, another excellent thriller about the mighty post-colonial rite of passage that is X-Treme vacationing. In Garland's book a map leads a few thrill-seeking Europeans to a remote Thai island that has become a kind of secret backpackers' utopia, and which eventually comes undone in spectacular Lord of the Flies fashion. Initially The Ruins has a more modest premise—the Americans really just want an interesting couple of days and a good story to take home. But the horrors they stumble into eventually outstrip any conceivable worse-case scenario.
Actually, it's the relative banality of the start of The Ruins that is one of its great strengths. Anyone who has ever roughed it will recognize the nervous second-guessing that besets the Americans before they set off on their adventure. Equally recognizable is the sickening feeling that comes a few miles in when the trail does not seem to be going where it should. The Americans, with Mathias and an affable Greek nicknamed Pablo, hike on far beyond the limit of common sense, each person goaded by an irrational fear of being a spoilsport and an irrational hope for the amazing traveler's "experience" that may be just around the bend.
Suddenly they are confronted by Mayan villagers—mysterious, unimpressed, and Third-Worldy—who, after first trying to shoo the Americans away, abruptly force them further up the trail. The Mayans inexplicably herd them into a clearing where the archeologists had once been, and stand guard, refusing to let them leave. To make things worse, Pablo quickly injures himself at the bottom of a shaft while trying to retrieve a ringing cell phone: A good 50 pages are then devoted to the excruciating task of hauling him out as the night approaches.
It's around this point that Smith's spell began to take hold on me and interfere with my sleep. What he does marvelously well is express the story's life-or-death suspense in the very simple and identifiable terms of his characters' personalities and their relationships. Eagle Scout Jeff responds heroically in the circumstances, but is also a fairly authoritarian taskmaster (within six hours he's requiring the others to preserve their urine in case they run out of water). His girlfriend, Amy, on the other hand, is an introvert, prone to lassitude and depression, and has a habit of refusing Jeff just to unsettle him. Eric is laid-back, a terminal wise-cracker and useless in emergencies. And Stacy, the nicest of the bunch, is epitomized by her nickname "Spacey." These people, with their individual strengths and flaws, are entirely normal and in normal situations would be perfectly likable, but now, trapped in the clearing, their foibles magnify and acquire hugely self-destructive powers. Such was evidently the formula that brought Smith such acclaim with his first book, A Simple Plan (which Stephen King called the best suspense novel of the '90s), and at the heart of Smith's rapt storytelling is a fundamental theme of ancient Greek drama: One's character is one's doom. A terrible and terrifying fatefulness hovers over these poor young people, whose struggles, whether noble or venal, clever or foolish, seem to always bring them nearer to their ends.
The second half of The Ruins is where the horror story enters, and I won't give it away except to reveal that it involves a carnivorous and possibly demonic species of vine that does not sing "Feed me, Seymour," but does nearly everything else. If the start of the book had suggestions of Aeschylus, this vine now appears as a kind of demon ex machina, a plot element that comes out of nowhere and is not subject to any realistic strictures. It makes for straightforward horror of the broad and meaningless sort. And while the remainder of The Ruins is amusing, readable and even still disturbing, the randomness of the horror does much to vitiate the psychological terror that catalyzed the start.
My only real disquiet with this drop-off comes from the knowledge that Ben Stiller has already optioned The Ruins for a movie. The vine is so ready-made for the transfer to the big screen that it's hard not to wonder how much Smith had a film adaptation in mind as he wrote. As it is, on the page the vine will not cost anyone any sleep; at most you'll find it sort of cool.
A cool, well-written book is only somewhat disappointing when judged against an intense, well-written book. In either case, in The Ruins, Smith demonstrates a considerable talent for character insight and for suspense, which together make a formidable combination.
The Ruins
Scott Smith
Random House, $24.95