Scott Smith, The Ruins

The vacation is close to idyllic. Four friends in the Yucatán in August, three weeks of snorkeling and sailing and lazing in the too-hot sun before they head off in the fall to their various futures—graduate school for three of them, a job teaching English in a prep school for the other. They're Americans, Jeff and Amy and Stacy and Eric, two couples, but the group quickly becomes international: Mathias, a German with good English, and a trio of non-English-speaking Greeks join the party, tagging along with the Americans. A hint of menace over this situation is introduced on the book's first page:

"There were three Greeks—in their early twenties, like Mathias and the rest of them—and they seemed friendly enough, even if they did appear to be following them about."

Eventually the friends decide to take a trip to the interior, to an archaeological dig a half day away by bus, then taxi, then foot. It's another adventure, and a good deed, as Mathias is worried about his brother, who'd made the same trip some days earlier. But it turns out that once you leave the tourist areas behind, the air-conditioned bars and the hotels and the miniature golf courses, the Yucatán can get very dangerous very fast.

There are no chapters in Scott Smith's book, just section breaks, which is probably just as well: turning the page to start a new chapter would just slow down your reading. The book is scary as hell, with a villain that is, once you put the book aside and start to think about it, frankly ridiculous, but that doesn't matter either: the book is frightening enough, the plot compelling enough to keep you reading. In a sense, also, the identity of the villain doesn't matter that much. The Ruins is really a long character study, its well-developed protagonists, isolated from the rest of the world, put under duress and under a magnifying glass. What happens to someone, the question is, when he's subjected to fear and stress? How do different sorts of people respond to it? And do their varying responses matter that much, in the long run? Eric asks himself the question at the beginning of the book: "Who are they?" he wonders, thinking first of the trio of Greeks, then of his own friends and girlfriend. The question will be echoed at the book's end.

The Ruins is a horror story, but character-driven. It reminded me, particularly in its opening pages, of a Patricia Highsmith novel: the author introduces his characters and their situation and hints at something awful to come, in direct, uncomplicated prose, as if telling the story were the easiest thing in the world to do. It's a fantastic read, and you'll want, if you can, to read it straight through without interruption. But if you do, start early in the morning: this is not a book you'll want to be reading late at night, when you're the only one lying awake, when the rest of the house, beyond the halo of your bedside lamp, is dark.