The Ruins is a novel by Scott Smith.
Finished on: 4.7.2026

Content Note: racism

Plot:
Amy and Stacy are best friends. Together with their respective boyfriends Jeff and Eric, they are on holiday in Mexico, and are having a grand old time. Having connected with a German tourist, Mathias, they are ready to go on a bit of an adventure when Mathias tells them that he was traveling with his brother Henrich. Henrich met a girl, an archaeologist working at a local dig and followed her there. Now it is time to go home and Mathias wants to pick his brother up. The digsite is in the middle of the jungle, and Mathias only has a hand-drawn map. The five of them, plus a Greek tourist they partied with despite not knowing his name (he introduced himself as Pablo as a joke) and him not speaking English set off. But they are not prepared for what the jungle holds for them.

I saw the movie adaptation of this novel shortly after it came out and was deeply impressed by it. I then went ahead and immediately bought the book – and then didn’t read it until almost twenty years later. As it happens sometimes. Now I finally got around to it and I rather enjoyed reading the book, though it didn’t impress me as much as the movie did back then.

The Ruins is a very readable book, fast-paced and well-written enough to keep you hooked, although it is by no means a short novel. I especially liked the character work. The book’s switches between the perspectives of the four Americans was very well-handled, and both their individuality and the way they relate to each other was beautifully set out, albeit leaning maybe a tad too much on explaining things.

Things quickly become gruesome (and I realized how much some of the most gruesome moments stuck in my head from the film – a rarity for me). Smith has a very deft hand at invoking the injuries and making his readers (or at least me) cringe. Add to that the evocative descriptions of the oppressive heat (reading this in summer may have helped there) and the thirst, and you got a very uncomfortable book.

It becomes pretty clear very soon that this is not a book that would give us some way out. I think I would have enjoyed that 20 years ago, but by now I have really come to appreciate books, or stories in general, that leave us with hope rather than the empty nihilism of everything being lost, and worse to come.

I also thought a lot about the way the “Mayans” are portrayed here, and generally the setting of the story in Mexico. While the Mayans appear like the villains at first, they have good reasons for the way they are acting (well, mostly), as becomes quickly apparent. But they are so thoroughly construed as The Other, including the fact that there is not one among them who speaks even one word of Spanish (which, quite frankly, seems unrealistic, but I might be wrong about that), that I can’t help but feel a racist undercurrent here. That is compounded with the setting: a white writer sends a group of white people into a Brown, dangerous, foreign country where something almost alien waits for them, protected by ancient secrets. It’s orientalism, Latin America edition.

I had a good time with the novel for the most part but that last part did leave me very uncomfortable. And overall, I think my good memories of the movie adaptation, plus a couple of “best of horror” lists that I stumbled upon recently that included the book made me expect a little too much from a mostly really solid book.

Summarizing: Not a bad read, at least not if you’re white.