The Ruins - Scott Smith

From the back of the book:

Two young couples are on a lazy Mexican vacation - sun-drenched days, wild nights, making friends with fellow tourists. When the brother of one of those friends disappears, they decide to venture into the jungle to look for him. What started out as a fun day trip slowly spirals into a nightmare when they stumble on the site of some ancient ruins...and the terrifying presence that lurks there.

Let me preface this by saying this book is not at all what I expected it to be. The fact that it's a bestseller gave me high hopes (and maybe that's part of the reason for the disappointment), but it was not up to par. It's really far-fetched - it's fiction, I get that - but so much so that I was rolling my eyes at times. With Stephen King's proclamation that it's "The best horror novel of the new century" on the front cover, I was expecting to have nightmares.

It was a page-turner, I'll give Smith that, but man was I disappointed. Four friends make friends with other tourists while on vacation in Mexico, which was their first of many mistakes. One of the brothers disappears, and on a whim the 4 set off with 2 other guys in search of the missing. Second mistake? The 2 guys they've just met do not know much English. So, they set off into the Mexican jungle with a language barrier, hardly any food and water and about 4 bottles of tequila.

The group proceeds to get lost, take a few wrong turns, and cannot figure out why they can't get past the flock of Mayans they come across. The Mayans force them to stay on a hill, with nowhere to go, no way to get out if they weren't already lost, and they become hungry, dehydrated and weak. Their Greek buddy ends up falling into a hole and breaks his back, and it sets off their downhill fight for survival. The group waits and waits for help to come, for rain, and to survive the odds. Then there's the vine. A vine that crawls to them, mocks them, sucks up their waste, and eventually, kills them.

If I were grading this book on an A-F scale, I'd give it a C. There were parts where I couldn't wait to see what happened next, but it was definitely not the horror story I was hoping for.