Three days later the friends arrive and the book ends with them being trapped in exactly the same predicament. Eventually there is one girl remaining who chooses to slash her wrists and die before she can feel the vine taking her. One by one, the vine gets them and causes a slow but painful death.

As more is discovered about this plant, the story goes from bizarre to preposterous, as the vine eventually imitates sounds and smells, then their actual voices to pit them against each other. Then they discover that the dense green vine surrounding the camp area is not your usual foliage. As water and food supplies dwindle, they must stick together and ration themselves to ensure survival, all with the hope that their friends back at the hotel will eventually come and find them. The next few days are an experimentation in the devolving of civilized humanity, as they soon find skeletons of past occupants in the area – all mysteriously stripped of any flesh. Following the paths, they end up on a plateau and find themselves trapped by a group of armed Mayans at the bottom of the hill who will shoot to kill if they come too close. Our cast is a group of five twenty-something characters: two couples who went to college together (including a German and a Greek) hear about some ruins nearby while they are vacationing in Cancun.

Scott Smith has written a most unusual book with The Ruins, starting off kind of slow with the necessary character set-up, but then suddenly kicks into high gear and goes from scary to crazy to outright impossible yet riveting. For this book to be classed a mystery (at least it is at Borders) is a grave injustice to the genre community: The Ruins is outright horror, through and through I mean it has a blood-sucking vine for crying out loud!

The Ruins by Scott Smith