Cancun, Mexico: holiday time, a time of adventure, a time for having fun. Two American couples in search of foreign enlightenment—Jeff and Amy, Stacey and Eric—meet a German called Matthias on a diving trip and go in search of his brother; but what are the strange ruins where Henrich has set his heart on going? And why would there be a hill in the middle of the jungle covered in tiny red flowers, swathed in strange vines, surrounded by ploughed dirt…Out in the middle of nowhere?

The group soon find out and think it’s some kind of a joke: the hill, apparently, has a secret–one which makes no sense; anyone who sets foot on it is doomed to stay there forever. But will it be forever? And what does the vine have to do with any of it?

The Ruins, Scott Smith’s blistering, blood-spattered second novel after the great A Simple Plan, is a truly excruciating tale of love, survival, and how ignorance can punish you and be anything but bliss. A long book at approximately 500 odd pages, Smith unravels its events in such a fashion that, like any good horror mystery, the reader only finds out the true scale of terror when it’s far too late…

If it sounds like a limited concept, you’d be forgiven for thinking so. But Smith’s expert ability at linking together every single element of what seems to be a routine mistake that anyone could make, then flicking a switch, turning the mass of jumbled confusion into clear, unrelenting horror, filled with dark purpose, is second to none. As the book reaches its inevitable horrific conclusion—with the tale being told alternately by each of the four main characters—it seems there may even be hope. Right up until the end there’s the feeling that it can’t all just end, not like that.

The Ruins isn’t just a horror novel; it’s a comedy, a drama, a male and female love story and a head-trip of psychology all at once. Stephen King called it the best horror novel of the year and nobody’s complaining.

This is really one of the best novels that I have ever read, I flipped through it my entire three valleys ski holiday, and I swear that I saw more of those pages than I did the slopes!