I discovered Scott B. Smith’s The Ruins after having seen the movie version.  The film is scary but the book is scarier.  I wrote about the movie last year, so I won’t worry about spoilers here.  I will say that even with its bleak ending the film has a happier resolution.  If you read my post, and remember it, the following summary may not be necessary, but here goes: two couples and two friends vacationing in Mexico set off in search of one of the friends’ missing brother.  They travel to a very remote location and discover that the missing brother is dead.  Worse, that he was killed by the natives for trying to escape a vine-covered ruin.  The vine is carnivorous, and, unlike in the movie, clearly intelligent, and sentient.  It tricks the young people into harming themselves and then it begins to eat them.  It especially preys on open wounds, but it can smother a person if it so desires.

The book is full of tension.  Although a couple of injuries take place early on, it’s over halfway through before someone actually dies.  And the others don’t follow quickly.  The narrative asks probing questions about ethics and mercy.  When (if ever) is it okay to kill someone who clearly has zero chance of survival?  Is it still murder?  Complicating things, for me, was the fact that I couldn’t remember clearly how the movie ended.  Eventually it came back to me, but this is one of those cases where the film and book, although with the same writer, diverge a bit.  The characters are clearly sketched here but defy expectations and stereotypes.  And it is sometimes the case that you aren’t sure who might be telling the truth and who might be trying to protect themselves through prevarication.

An effectively written novel, it had me looking askance at plants from time to time.  We have a quite aggressive vine in our yard that seems determined to be the Trump of all the plants.  I suspect someone planted it long before we moved in, unless it’s simply a successful exploiter of happy happenstance.  I’ve tried uprooting it every year, but I can’t seem to get to the brain of the operation.  It’s easy to believe that if plants were sentient, and could move a bit faster than they tend to, that such a scenario as in The Ruins might unfold.  The question remains whether the local Mayans simply can’t eradicate it or if they might indeed have some worshipful regard for it.  The two may end up being nearly the same thing as human power is unable to tell nature what to do.