The Ruins – Scott Smith

I meant to have this review up the day I finished it (and that would be the day after I read it which was the day after it was released) but it shook me up so hard that I needed a couple of weeks to recover.

I made a scene in Barnes & Noble when they didn’t have copies properly displayed and checked back every other day to ensure they got their act together.

Now maybe we are a little crazy but we loved A Simple Plan (both the book and the movie but read the book first,) so much that we were dying to read The Ruins and knew it would be a pleaser.

With no chapters and endless suspense and desperate and dire circumstances, The Ruins is similar in tone to A Simple Plan but entirely different in content and environment. Mr. Smith seems very interested in circumstances that trap us and how one trap is as like the next and he is seems to enjoy forcing the reader to contemplate how things would have been differently if only the smallest thing had gone down differently. (The characters also ponder this as they face horrific trials and obstacles and fight for their survival.)

The Ruins is the best book we have read all year and where it might not be a heavily intellectual read, it is a damn smart thriller and puts so many other works of similar attempts to shame that it isn’t funny.

Scott Smith creates a situational thriller that is so unforeseen in its unfolding that when the proverbial crap hits the fan, the audience like the story’s characters, are in too deep to turn back.

We won’t reveal a thing about the story because this is a book best read with zero knowledge of its content. This is a story that needs to be lived and experienced because it is a numbing thriller that will leave the weak stomached and frail minded in a ball of shaking nerves.

The Ruins is an adventure thriller that is secretly a psychological thriller disguised as a study in circumstance and consequence. It is easily the best thriller of the year and so unique and unusual that to not read it would be cheating yourselves of the true thrill ride of the summer.

Terry
August 2006