Hooray for Killer Kudzu!
A Book Review of a Horror Novel Where the Evil, Carnivorous, Jungle Vines are the Real Heroes...
The Ruins, by Scott Smith, 2006, pp. 369, Survival Horror.
The Ruins has been around since 2006. It’s a book generally well-received among horror fans and critics, and has been adapted into a film. The front cover declares it a “National Bestseller” and a Stephen King blurb boldly proclaims it “The best horror novel of the new century.” Wow! All of that must mean this book is an absolute masterpiece, right?
Nope. Nowhere close to a masterpiece. To paraphrase the great Tarantino crime lord, Marsellus Wallace in Pulp Fiction: “No, man. It’s pretty fuckin’ far from OK.”
Evil, sentient, carnivorous jungle vines are the “monster” in The Ruins. You read that right—a killer variety of kudzu guarded by armed Mayan villagers threatens a sextet of tedious, rock-stupid, arrogant twentysomethings in this constipated survival horror tale—the first in which I rooted for the monster to kill every last one of the protagonists.
The Ruins belongs within the “vacation gone horribly wrong” horror. Four recent American college graduates are vacationing in Cancun, Mexico, enjoying one last blow-out before getting down to “real life.” One couple, Jeff and Amy (who’ve got their act together), are about to enter medical school. Jeff is very matter-of-fact, organized, and uptight. His girlfriend Amy, is also focused and serious about life, but thinks Jeff overdoes it sometimes, so there’s tension between them.
The other couple, Eric and Stacy, represent the lower tiers of native intellect, academic achievement, and personal ambition. Eric is a generic frat boy/jock, with fleeting concerns: getting comatose with drink and sex with Stacy. He wants to become a school teacher, and has a trusting, optimistic and cheerful view of life: the ideal horror story simpleton. Stacy is the ideal girlfriend for such a low-kilowatt personage. At college, she was known as “Spacy Stacy,” with a tendency to stare off into space and hum random melodies when bored. Indecisive and feckless, she’s one of the duller tools in the shed. She loves Eric, but when drunk (like her beau, getting wasted is a favorite hobby) she’ll screw anything with a pulse. Stacy wants to be a “social worker.” And of course, she and Eric want to get married when they’re both settled, whatever that means.
Two side characters play into the narrative. Mathias, a German tourist, and “Pablo,” one of three Greek men the group meet (his two buddies call themselves “Juan” and “Don Quixote.” None speak English or Spanish, and have adopted these Spanish noms de guerre for kicks in Mexico, and exchange them among themselves for added laughs).
Carefree partying opens the story. The American quartet spend the days sunbathing and scuba diving, then enjoy their evenings exploring new adventures in being liquored up. Eric enjoys carousing with the three Greeks, inventing drinking games, and Stacy gets plastered and gets steamy with one of the Greek gods, while her absent-minded boyfriend is passed out somewhere. At breakfast one morning, Mathias the German (whom all have befriended for amorphous reasons) broaches the topic of a falling-out he had with his brother Henrich over a young woman the latter met and fell hard for. The brothers had a big fight over this, and Henrich stormed out and ran off with the girl to a jungle archaeological site where she worked. Both brothers were to fly back to Germany at week’s end. Mathias decides to go to the jungle site, collect Henrich, and bring him back—Jeff speaks for the gang, and the other three agree to join in the adventure—from which they’re supposed to return by dark. They chance upon “Pablo”—one of the Greeks—in their hotel lobby, and through pantomime, they tell him the story, and he agrees to come along, since his two pals decided to go deep sea fishing without him.
So we’ve got four American twentysomethings (two of whose brains are powered by potato batteries in grade school science books), and a Greek tourist (who can only speak Greek), who’ve agreed to accompany a mysterious German tourist they’ve never met, deep into a Mexican jungle to visit his brother (whom they’ve never seen) for an exciting day-long excursion, because he’s a nice guy and they feel they can trust him. Nothing new, folks—we’ve landed smack in the middle of generic horror movie trope territory: a band of college-age American “vacationers,” (usually in Europe) come upon a creepy, abandoned medieval church or castle that’s always well-kept, but strangely sealed off. Two couples: one with brains, one feckless and brain-damaged (the guy a frat boy/jock, the girl a dopey blonde). There’s always a dust-up over the group staying the night in the creepy building, and someone—usually the dopey blonde girl—says something like “It’ll be so cool you guys!” They stay there, and they all die in some graphically violent manner, except for the dopey blonde girl, who sometimes ends up possessed by the evil demon, devil—name the “bad thing”—to carry it into the atrocious, incoherent sequel. A few adjustments aside, the same facts apply in The Ruins.
The party follow a map Mathias’s brother drew before he left. They leave Cancun via tour bus and arrive in a little tourist town. A rusty pickup truck hauls them into the jungle—the driver warns the cautious Amy that they’re “going to a bad place,” but the warning is ignored. They trek several miles to a Mayan village as hospitable as Marlon Brando’s base camp in Apocalypse Now, and follow the map into a jungle clearing, where the “archaeological site” is supposed to be. They only find a hill, covered with green, leafy vines blooming with bright orange flowers. The situation escalates when Mayan villagers (who speak neither English nor Spanish) who’ve followed them from the village aggressively try to get them to leave the site. Amy backs up with her camera to get a wide shot of the confrontation, and catches her foot in the flowering vines. The villagers stop talking and produce bows and arrows, and a few guns—and force the six tourists up the hill, where they find empty tents, abandoned equipment, and a deep mine shaft. They run down the opposite side, and encounter more opposition. Mathias finds his brother’s skeleton inside a mound of tangled vines, identifying him by a piece of jewelry. No flesh, no clothes—just bones and metal. The armed Mayans force them back up the hill, and they all deduce that they’re surrounded, and will never be allowed to leave alive.
A variety of tedious events carry the book forward. Pablo hears something akin to a cell phone ring tone coming from the bottom of the mine shaft (why aren’t these young people carrying cell phones themselves?), so several pages describe how the party make a harness to lower him down, then he falls, breaking his back. Then a lengthy narrative provides extensive play-by-play about their building a makeshift backboard against fading daylight, how Eric goes down to help, then gets stuck, then Amy goes down and brings them both back (this discussion seems to be endless). Eric is pretty banged up—then Stacy jerks him off when everyone else is asleep—more for her pleasure and comfort—he’s almost been killed, but whatever. Later, we learn that the semen from this minor event attracts the vines, who attack him in his sleep, burrowing into his flesh. Mathias has to cut into his flesh to extract the vines, but Eric remains paranoid the rest of the story, convinced vines are growing throughout his body.
Jeff also amputates Pablo’s legs to prevent a deadly infection—with a camping knife they find lying about. Most of the narrative is internal monologue of the four Americans—Jeff and Stacy mostly. How Jeff is such a take-charge guy, and his calculations about how he’ll get everyone out of this (he was an Eagle Scout, after all). Stacy ruminates on very vital matters, like how her feet hurt (she wore sandals to the jungle), and the fate of a wristwatch she left on her hotel room night table. Amy contemplates pilfering the group’s limited supply of water. Collectively, they await the arrival of Pablo’s two Greek companions, whom he left a note for when he left—their hope being that they’ll act as a rescuing cavalry to get them out of the situation (what they’d do when they got there—never discussed). A useful delusion to keep their sanity, I guess. As the week wore on, at least one of them held out hope that “the Greeks” would come.
Here’s where I started to take the side of the vines. This bunch were a very boring, one-dimensional, rock-stupid slate of protagonists for a “survival horror” story. Moreso since big guy Jeff vaunted his expertise as an Eagle Scout. The vines were not only sentient and malevolent, but apparently had some type of advanced perception, since they sensed the deteriorating group dynamics among the six people. They could “record” sound, and “edit” it—they replayed a false dialogue between Mathias and Stacy to trigger jealousy in Eric, already delirious with pain and paranoia. The vines also taunted the group, and like human masters of guerrilla warfare, picked every one of the group off by reaching out, suffocating them, and dragging them back into the jungle, there to be eaten. Jeff died by both a Mayan arrow and vine assault, since he decided to chance a run for it one night, and took an arrow through his neck for his trouble, the vines doing the rest. Not surprisingly, the “last girl” of this misadventure was the dumbest—Spacy Stacy. Alas, her mental state was totally shattered and she opted to slice her own wrists and allow the vines to take her that way.
In a dark comic gesture, Smith attached an Epilogue; the two Greeks do show up, well after the main cast are dead and gone. They arrive with a group of women they brought from Cancun, their intention to continue their party with Pablo once they reach the site—they follow his sketched map on the note he left, arrive at the clearing, and marvel at the beautiful green vines and their bright flowers.
So that’s what The Ruins was all about. When I was halfway through reading it, I’d brought it with me on my morning work commute. It was raining heavily, and as I reached for something, I lost my grip and it fell with a “plop” into a very deep puddle, several inches deep—it absorbed the water like a sponge. At that time, I thought it was an omen; I hadn’t seen any real “horror” to speak of at that point in the book, and was about to abort the mission, until I invoked the “sunken cost contingency.” I paid about $18.00 for it, already read half, and it was destroyed, so a return was impossible. I pushed through, and now I make my ruling—fair enough.
I can’t see why this book was so well-received. None of the characters were sympathetic. The title was meaningless—the hill and the mine shaft were all there were. No “ruins” to speak of—no archaeological dig, no ancient temples, no lost city, no statues—not even a lousy little inscription on a potsherd! As for the main characters, they were generic B-grade horror movie quality—interchangeable with any group of clueless twentysomething horror victims in any garbage Hollywood horror flick. Furthermore, they didn’t even put up a fight! Not even a struggle or protest! Aside from Jeff sneaking down the hill once or twice at night, and envying the smell of the food the Mayans were cooking—all they did was wait. Sit there, bitch, sulk, and dream about how “The Greeks” were coming. What “Greeks,” dumbasses? The 300 Spartans? First idiotic thing they did was agree to follow this shady German guy they didn’t know from Adam off into the jungle because he seemed like a nice guy. Secondly, sure—they weren’t equipped like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Special Forces team in Predator, but you’d think that six people (two of whom ready to enter medical school) could devise a basic attempt at fighting the killer kudzu! Like—setting fire to it, perhaps? They’ve got oil lamps and other flammable materials—like Pablo’s backpack, which he stuffed only with bottles of tequila—enough to give it a shot at least. Plus, they let the Mayans get the upper hand right away. You had four men against some old, fat man with a gun—two women as well—if they didn’t have the basic common sense to get the hell out of there when they saw that nothing was there but a hill, they could have done something to either even the odds up front or get out. But rather than think, they sat there—just sat there, waiting for “The Greeks” to send reinforcements.
Maybe if this cohort of fools awaited the Persians and King Xerxes they’d have had a better shot!
I'm with the vines. Your descriptions of the characters sound more engaging than the author's.