|
|
Whistle Stopper - The Ruins
|
List Price: $7.99
Our Price: $1.74
Your Save: $ 6.25 ( 78% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Vintage
|
Average Customer Rating:  
|
|
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780307278289
ISBN: 030727828X
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 528
Publication Date: 2007-07-31
Publisher: Vintage
Release Date: 2007-07-31
Studio: Vintage
|
|
|
|
|
|
Spotlight customer reviews:
|
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Ruins
Comment: This book looked interesting, especially because Stephen King has a positive quote on the cover. It was very disappointing. The entire time I was thinking, when will this be over. The worst part is that the book is suppose to be about ancient ruins...or it portrays itself as such but it is not about that at all. I was very disappointed.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Compelling Story, Not for the Squeamish
Comment: Not only is this a very compelling story, it's a great character study of ordinary people put into extraordinary circumstances. I enjoyed the book partly because I identified myself and my friends in the two couples and two friends who enter the Mexican jungle searching for an afternoon's adventure. They set out looking for one of the friend's brother, who has followed a new love interest to an archeological ruins and has not returned to his hotel in Cancun. The author's well-developed characters:: Jeff, Amy, Eric and Stacy all have bright futures ahead of them back in the States. Matthias, a German friend whom they meet while on their Cancun vacation, as well as a friendly non-English speaking Greek, whose name they are never completely sure of, make up the group who find terror and agony deep in the jungle.
Not only is the story disturbing in the horrible circumstances the friends find themselves in, I kept asking myself how I would have acted if I had been part of the group. They all stay pretty much in character, which begs the question: how would anyone act when in what may be a hopeless situation? Are you always completely faithful to your partner when drunk? Sober? When you have decisions to make that impact not only your life, but those of friends and near strangers, what do you choose to do? Do you take chances? Are you loyal? Selfish? A leader? Or a follower who gives up? How do you act when your faith in yourself and your loved one is tested?
These questions kept me guessing about my own character, while I kept anxiously reading, curious and fascinated as to what the answers might be.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Most depressing book I've ever read
Comment: It's not that I don't like horror novels, King is one of my favorite authors, it's just that this book, simply put, is a MAJOR bummer novel. From beginning to end, one bad thing after another, one sick thing that just gets sicker, gross, depressing, not even a sliver of an ending that is begrudginly satisfying. A "novel" that runs on and on with without even a chapter break. Ugh, not going to invest a dime in this author again.
I'd give it a zero if there were an option here ......
Customer Rating:
Summary: Tedious waste of time
Comment: For the life of me I can't see how anyone could find this book 'intense', much less scary. The plot twists are minor league and telegraphed twenty pages in advance. You can see the ending coming almost from the moment they arrive at the ruins, and the only reason I kept reading was the belief that such a highly praised writer would never stoop to such an obvious cliche.The characters all spend a lot of time thinking back on previous times of their lives, the kind of stuff that is interesting to yourself but no one else. One character spends the biggest part of the book breathing in "rasping, phlegmy" gasps. The vine is really kind of goofy when you get right down to it, as well as inconsistent -- it might as well be yelling "Feed me!". There are a couple of gruesome scenes that feel shoe-horned in to an otherwise mundane story. I don't mind that there isn't a final explanation for it all, but there is so much left unsaid and unexplored that it feels more like lazy storytelling.
Customer Rating:
Summary: An Insult To Struggling Writers
Comment: I'd heard mixed things about this book and only read it because my kids and grandkids got it for me as a father's day gift. After just the first page, I was appalled. It was the most passive and telling work I've ever read. Still, I wanted to see if things got better, so I slogged through it.
This goes to show that in the publishing world, it's not who you know, but who you blow. Mr. Smith had success with his book and movie, A Simple Plan, and apparently that's all the clout he needed to get this piece of junk released. His editor apparently did nothing more than check it for typos because it has so many other problems, I just can't see how he got away with it without having connections. As the title of the review suggests, this work is an insult to all the struggling writers out there. If any one of us had submitted just the first page of this thing to any agent, we would've been lucky to get a generic rejection letter, if not ignored. If we'd got any feedback, it would've been that it is very passive, telling, and mixes points of view. That's not even getting into the story yet.
Just halfway through the book, I wondered how he got someone like Stephen King to do such a glowing blurb about this thing. It makes me wonder if King even read it. Then again, I read Insomnia.
The point is that if this guy didn't have pull and a lot of connections, there is no way this book would've got past any editor or agent without major changes. Then, to have the publisher shove it down our throats with big display racks full of this book is just ludicrous. It shows how arbitrary the publishing industry is, and why probably 90% of all the great books will never see print while we're given such lousy choices. No wonder the publishing industry is in trouble.
As for the story, I give it one star for having a pretty good icky bug, the vine. I give it a second star for using scenes instead of chapters. That's an unusual format and in this case, it works.
I hated this story on so many levels. I would've liked it much better if it was 300 instead of 500 pages, as most of it is filled with the characters whining to themselves about their problems. There's a little bit of story movement, then a whole bunch of character thoughts, then a little story, etc. I want to know a bit about the characters, but not at the expense of having to wait page after page for something to happen.
Let's talk about the icky bug (the vine). There is no real explanation for why it's there. That isn't necessarily a bad thing. The characters couldn't find out from the Mayans since they are isolated from them and don't speak their language. So instead, they speculate, but come to no real conclusion. We're left with the big mystery of not knowing the back story of the vine and it is left to your imagination. I personally would've liked him to spend a few pages fleshing out the icky bug and less fleshing out the characters.
Then there is the ending, which I hated most of all. If I were the first reviewer, this would be a spoiler, but since I've seen several others that have revealed the ending, I don't think my saying so is going to spoil anything. This story is like a 70's movie where the hero or heroes die in the end. I hate that! Then again, the way it is written, there is no way one could survive without adding a rescue or escape arc. That would mean adding another fifty or one hundred pages if internal whining from either the escapee or the rescuer.
I know some of you out there would love this book. Go ahead. As for me, I wouldn't recommend it except as a good example for a class on how not to write a novel.
|
|
|
Editorial Reviews:
|
In 1993, Scott Smith wowed readers with A Simple Plan, his stunning debut thriller about what happens when three men find a wrecked plane and bag stuffed with over 4 million dollars--a book that Stephen King called "Simply the best suspense novel of the year!" Now, thirteen years after writing a novel that turned into a pretty great movie featuring Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton, Smith is back, with The Ruins, a horror-thriller about four Americans traveling in Mexico who stumble across a nightmare in the jungle. Who better to tell readers if Smith has done it again than the undisputed King of Horror (and champion of Smith's first book)? We asked Stephen King to read The Ruins and give us his take. Check out his review below. --Daphne Durham
Guest Reviewer: Stephen King
 Stephen King is the author of too many bestselling books to name here, but some of our favorites include: Cell, The Stand, On Writing, The Shining, and the entire Dark Tower series. King also received the National Book Foundation 2003 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, has had many movies and television miniseries adapted from his novels, short stories, and screenplays, and is a regular columnist for Entertainment Weekly. Keep your eyes peeled for Lisey's Story (October 2006), a new television series on TNT based on Nightmares & Dreamscapes (July 2007), and a graphic novel series based on the Dark Tower books coming from Marvel (2007).
When I heard that Scott Smith was publishing a new novel this summer, I felt the way I did when my kids came in an hour or two late from their weekend dates: a combination of welcoming relief (thank God you're back) mingled with exasperation and anger (where the hell have you been?). Well, it's only a book, you say, and maybe that's true, but Scott Smith is a singularly gifted writer, and it seems to me that the twelve years between his debut--the cult smash A Simple Plan--and his return this summer with The Ruins is cause for exasperation, if not outright anger. Certainly Smith, who has been invisible save for his Academy Award-nominated screenplay for the film version of A Simple Plan, will have some 'splainin to do about how he spent his summer vacation. Make that his last twelve summer vacations. But enough. The new book is here, and the question devotees of A Simple Plan will want answered is whether or not this book generates anything like Plan's harrowing suspense. The answer is yes. The Ruins is going to be America's literary shock-show this summer, doing for vacations in Mexico what Jaws did for beach weekends on Long Island. Is it as successful and fulfilling as a novel? The answer is not quite, but I can live with that, because it's riskier. There will be reviews of this book by critics who have little liking or understanding for popular fiction who'll dismiss it as nothing but a short story that has been bloated to novel length (I'm thinking of Michiko Kakutani, for instance, who microwaved Smith's first book). These critics, who steadfastly grant pop fiction no virtue but raw plot, will miss the dazzle of Smith's technique; The Ruins is the equivalent of a triple axel that just misses perfection because something's wrong with the final spin. It's hard to say much about the book without giving away everything, because the thing is as simple and deadly as a leg-hold trap concealed in a drift of leaves…or, in this case, a mass of vines. You've got four young American tourists--Eric, Jeff, Amy, and Stacy--in Cancun. They make friends with a German named Mathias whose brother has gone off into the jungle with some archeologists. These five, plus a cheerful Greek with no English (but a plentiful supply of tequila), head up a jungle trail to find Mathias's brother…the archaeologists…and the ruins. Well, two out of three ain't bad, according to the old saying, and in this case; what's waiting in the jungle isn't just bad, it's horrible. Most of The Ruins's 300-plus pages is one long, screaming close-up of that horror. There's no let-up, not so much as a chapter-break where you can catch your breath. I felt that The Ruins did draw on a trifle, but I found Scott Smith's refusal to look away heroic, just as I did in A Simple Plan. It's the trappings of horror and suspense that will make the book a best seller, but its claim to literature lies in its unflinching naturalism. It's no Heart of Darkness, but at its suffocating, terrifying, claustrophobic best, it made me think of Frank Norris. Not a bad comparison, at that. One only hopes Mr. Smith won't stay away so long next time.--Stephen King
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
