The Ruins

Plotwise, it's like every haunted house story and its variants you ever read or viewed, from Cabin in the Woods to Haunting of Hill House, this one just happens outside, on a hill in the Yucatan jungle, next to an abandoned mine shaft, vines dense around the hill like Friar Tuck's hairstyle, and custodial Mayans chasing tourists away or, if the thrillseekers make it past them, they get an arrow in the throat for trying to leave.

Because, believe me, if you're jailed on that pile of death with the mounds of bones peeping out of vine bunches all around you, a cell phone which isn't really a cell phone calling you to the bottom of a darkened shaft so you break your back in the fall trying to find it, yeah, you and your buddies with no food or water to speak of, the couple of girls are no help, and the Greek doesn't speak the language and the German is reticent, stoic; boy, it gets even tougher when your bud thinks the vines have penetrated his skin and he's cuttin' himself, bleeding out all over, everyone getting hysterical, hungry, terrorized, even drunk ‘cause you brought tequila instead of water. Next morning, the Greek with the broken back is still alive, still screaming outside the tent in the mud while the vines strip his legs of flesh. Inside the tent, you hear your own voice mimicked from the jungle, you know the vines are laughing at you, waiting, savoring, enjoying each ghastly encounter, slurping your vomit, drinking all the spilled blood, chewing the dying flesh of your body while you slept.

Beyond hope, you know it's not gonna end real well. Even when you try most of the Boy Scout tricks of survival like rain water retention, fire building, rationing the brought twinkies since there's nothing on the hill except those fuckin' vines which are getting bolder, moving in defiance of everything rational, goading you with creepy notions as if they were sentient and doing all this for no other reason than pure, unsullied evil. Will your brain explode from fear, or, will you drift off, mumbling incoherencies like one of the girls does? You didn't think you could hold on through the fear, the horror, the certain death approaching while absorbing more pain, more mental anguish, more grief seeing your friends fall screaming and crying covered in flesh-eating vines.

The Ruins is a full-bore rocket-ride of visceral horror. At 319 pages, it's a little verbose as superfluous details and pieces of backstory fill in between the chewfests and frenzied reactions. For those seeking logic and rules in the world, turn to the Eagle Scout as he organizes the group with survival chores, even going as far as suggesting they eat one of their dead. They are all slipping into a fog of insanity from these dire, impossible circumstances, the promises of being rescued become dimmer with each, black-as-tar nightfall.

There is no reasonable explanation given for the animated, killing vines(1). With no apparent subtext to muck up the horror, this is that ticking clock rundown to unavoidable death—you know, pretty much what you're denying about your own life path—just compressed with unpredictable circumstances and lots and lots of fear and pain.

But that's why you read this kind of fiction, right? As if experiencing it vicariously will somehow ward off experiencing it for real, eh? Well, good luck with that.

1) The closest it gets is one character speculating that whatever the vines are, they came out of the viscera of the earth via the mine shaft, apparently seeking not photosynthesis but something more alive and squirmy.