Joe Murphy on The Ruins
Hi Everyone-
Well, the great basement renovation of 2006 is finally wrapping up--sorry I haven't written anything for the last couple of weeks, but I was moving boxes of books around at home to avoid damage. The good news is that I will no longer have water in my basement, the bad is that I currently have about three inches of dust on everything.
Anyway, may I recommend a great fun, dark read for the summer? Scott Smith, who wrote the electrifying A Simple Plan about a decade ago, has a new novel, The Ruins, and it's a doozy. Four young American tourists, joined by a German and a Greek (language becomes an issue) leave their cozy, relaxing Mexican beachside vacation spot to look for an archeological dig. They find a mysterious hillside guarded by an impoverished Mayan tribe, who first warn them away from, then force them toward, the hill. Once trapped there, they find themselves in a desperate struggle for survival against a sinister, unexpected "other" among them. I don't want to give too much away, so let me say this: I haven't read anything that could be termed a horror novel since high school, and this thing creeped the bejeezus out of me. Seriously. It rockets along to what one can see from the beginning will be its unhappy conclusion with very taught prose, characters drawn with far more care than your typical suspense novel, and a wonderfully perverse sense of the degrees of human survival instinct and the extent to which it pays off (if at all). And, hopefully without revealing too much, I just have to add: Scott Smith must have had the worst gardening experience. Ever.
Finally: a big word of thanks to everyone who came in for the Random Summer buy-two-get-one-free promotion. It ends tonight (Thursday), and it's been a great run. Vintage, Anchor, and Broadway have such great lists, and I was delighted to see out customers taking advantage of the sale to stock up on their summer reading. These promotions have been so well-received that we have one more planned for late summer, with paperbacks from the prestigious independent publishers Harcourt Brace, Houghton Mifflin, and W. W. Norton. I'll let you know all about it when we get just a little closer.
Hope you're staying cool! If you need something fun to do in air conditioned comfort (in addition to reading, of course) check out the Stanley Donen retrospective at the AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring. I took my niece there to see Singin' in the Rain last weekend, and we both had a great time.
See you in the stores,
Joe Murphy
Head Book Buyer
Well, the great basement renovation of 2006 is finally wrapping up--sorry I haven't written anything for the last couple of weeks, but I was moving boxes of books around at home to avoid damage. The good news is that I will no longer have water in my basement, the bad is that I currently have about three inches of dust on everything.
Anyway, may I recommend a great fun, dark read for the summer? Scott Smith, who wrote the electrifying A Simple Plan about a decade ago, has a new novel, The Ruins, and it's a doozy. Four young American tourists, joined by a German and a Greek (language becomes an issue) leave their cozy, relaxing Mexican beachside vacation spot to look for an archeological dig. They find a mysterious hillside guarded by an impoverished Mayan tribe, who first warn them away from, then force them toward, the hill. Once trapped there, they find themselves in a desperate struggle for survival against a sinister, unexpected "other" among them. I don't want to give too much away, so let me say this: I haven't read anything that could be termed a horror novel since high school, and this thing creeped the bejeezus out of me. Seriously. It rockets along to what one can see from the beginning will be its unhappy conclusion with very taught prose, characters drawn with far more care than your typical suspense novel, and a wonderfully perverse sense of the degrees of human survival instinct and the extent to which it pays off (if at all). And, hopefully without revealing too much, I just have to add: Scott Smith must have had the worst gardening experience. Ever.Finally: a big word of thanks to everyone who came in for the Random Summer buy-two-get-one-free promotion. It ends tonight (Thursday), and it's been a great run. Vintage, Anchor, and Broadway have such great lists, and I was delighted to see out customers taking advantage of the sale to stock up on their summer reading. These promotions have been so well-received that we have one more planned for late summer, with paperbacks from the prestigious independent publishers Harcourt Brace, Houghton Mifflin, and W. W. Norton. I'll let you know all about it when we get just a little closer.Hope you're staying cool! If you need something fun to do in air conditioned comfort (in addition to reading, of course) check out the Stanley Donen retrospective at the AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring. I took my niece there to see Singin' in the Rain last weekend, and we both had a great time.
See you in the stores,
Joe Murphy
Head Book Buyer
1 Comments:
Joe--
I found this book to be sophomoric and dull. If you read enough of this genre, you know there are only a limited number of things that can happen, and this book telegraphs every one of them. The "bad seed" so to speak, is absolutely unbelievable, as are the hapless hipsters. I could not believe that they would be caught
without their cell phones. And, what are the Greeks doing there? Anyway, I thought the book would do better as a 3-page Treatment for a film with lots of very silly special effects around a very silly plot...like "Anaconda."
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