New in Paperback 'Ruins' Should Send Chills Up College Students' Spines

Summary

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With "The Ruins" (Vintage, 528 pp., $7.99), Scott Smith has written a novel so unsettling that college students across the country may rethink spending spring break in Cancun. As he did in his debut, "A Simple Plan," Smith conducts an exercise in human psychology to its harrowing end. But where the first story was a morality tale, "The Ruins" is an old-school horror show. It pares away characters, through blood-laden pages we read at full throttle.

The novel begins with four Americans in their 20s vacationing in Cancun, drinking away their last days before life after college collects them. On a whim, they and a Greek acquaintance join a German tourist on a trip to some Mayan ruins, where he thinks his brother has joined an archaeological dig. When they get there, one fatal error traps them in the jungle with little understanding of the stakes.

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New in Paperback 'Ruins' Should Send Chills Up College Students' Spines

As John Caniglia noted in The Plain Dealer, Smith's novel "grabs you and refuses to let go" with its "icy dissection of human nature in a hot, ...

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