{"id":1351,"date":"2006-09-26T20:23:27","date_gmt":"2006-09-26T20:23:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=1351"},"modified":"2006-09-26T20:23:27","modified_gmt":"2006-09-26T20:23:27","slug":"critic_at_large_8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/?p=1351","title":{"rendered":"Critic At Large: The Ruins"},"content":{"rendered":"

The plot of The Ruins<\/a><\/i> is B-movie simple.  A group of young people on vacation at a Mexican resort meet a German tourist whose brother has gone missing.  They, along with a Greek who has taken a liking to one of the American girls, decide to go looking for the missing German by following the directions he left his brother in a crudely drawn map; a map that leads to an abandoned archeological site deep in the jungle.  Once there, the group of young people realize they are trapped and that something inhuman is preying upon them.<\/p>\n

I won’t give away the nature of Scott Smith’s bogeyman, but in some ways, it’s the least important aspect of the book.  Like any good horror fiction, the monster is the blunt knife used to peel away at the characters’ psychological layers.  Smith gives the reader elegantly constructed glimpses into the interior life of each character as their shared circumstances become increasingly desperate and horrific.  This is a bleak, bleak story that does not treat any of its flawed characters kindly.  No roller coaster of fright here, but rather a slow, inexorable descent into the depths.  <\/p>\n

Next up, Frank Portman’s acclaimed debut King Dork<\/i><\/a>.  I’m also reading Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods<\/a><\/i>, my first Discworld book.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The plot of The Ruins is B-movie simple.  A group of young people on vacation at a Mexican resort meet a German tourist whose brother has gone missing.  They, along with a Greek who has taken a liking to one of the American girls, decide to go looking for the missing German by following the […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","category-1-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9Iwau-lN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1351\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/the19thfloor.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}