The Ruins

I think this was pretty well written, but not my cup of tea at all. The buildup was adroitly done - creating a background of banal normalcy, yet with lots of good creepy details to set the tone. But, once the characters got to the crisis point, and realized what their situation was, I just didn't care anymore. Without giving too much away, the story is quite obviously hopeless, and I have trouble getting involved in such a case.

I tried to read this years ago and liked it okay, but the characters annoyed me. I have heard multiple recommendations for this recently, so I tried it again. I loved the slow creeping suspense and the way the characters slowly figured out what was going on. I liked way we saw a little bit from everyone's perspective. At first I didn't like that there were no chapters, but after a while I really enjoyed reading it that way. The American characters are all flawed and I think that was good for this story. However, there were times that the flawed characters devolved into caricatures. And that really annoyed me. Overall, I glad I gave this a second chance.

A complete load of crap! About as scary as tangling your foot in a vine, and just as annoying. This pathetic excuse for horror generates most of its effect by the sheer horror of the rubbish that gets published, BOUGHT and then MADE INTO A MOVIE! I enjoyed Scott Smith's A Simple Plan, although I thought it was laboured. This is just painful: a “horror” story about a few spoiled and unlikeable American jerks who go off to a remote place and get trapped by–da-dah–killer plants! the interior monlogues are laughably facile and superficial, and there is about as much excitement as in a large serving of blancmange. A tedious, lame, dull and awful piece of rubbish. I threw the book away!