Fruit of the Vine

Want to read something really, er... creepy? OK, check out Scott Smith's excellent 'The Ruins'.

The Ruins is a story about a group of students who are on holiday in Cancun. They decide to take a break from the lazy hours on the beach and visit an archaeological dig in the jungle. Local Mayan Indians try and deter them from going, but the tourists continue on up to the mysterious ruins unaware of the terror and hell that awaits...
It's Smith's second novel. His first bestseller, the quite brilliant 'A Simple Plan', was published 13 years previously! Hopefully we won't have to wait so long until the next one.

The Ruins is a cracking read, full of tension and dread. Pepper the story with gross-out body horror scenes that David Cronenberg might approve of and you have a book that's hard to put down. Cleverly, the book has no chapters, so when you are reading there's no place to take a natural break and you have to keep on to the next harrowing moment, and then the next...

To quote Stephen King: 'does for Mexican vacations what Jaws did for New England beaches in 1975'. The Ruins website

Now, not long after I finished the book I discovered that it was being made into a film, due for release in April. My initial thought about this was 'oh dear, this could just be another trashy bunch of kids in peril movie' - I hope this isn't the case and it turns out to be better than the teen horror genre norm. The good news is that Scott Smith has written the screenplay; He received an Oscar nomination for his film adaptation of A Simple Plan, so this is a good sign for his vine infested Ruins... Just watching the trailer though I can see a fairly major character change from the book to the film - I can't imagine why this was necessary, fingers crossed that it works.