Reading the Ruins

It had been awhile since I read a good horror novel, and a girl can’t let too much heavy reading go to her head so I picked up a scary-looking paperback and fluffed up the pillows.

Scott Smith’s The Ruins is hailed by King King as the ‘best horror novel of the new century.’ Even without having read the other several thousand creepfests that hopeful novelists must have penned since that century started, I’ll go out on a limb to say I doubt that’s true. I don’t expect a page turner about flesh eating Mexican vines to be deep or anything, but 500 pages alone in the jungle with a small group of tequila swilling tourists gives ample time to really get to know the characters, and I still don’t. You’ve got to feel something for the cast if you want to remember the story later, and only the day after, I can’t recall all of their names.

Still, that said, not every writer manages the mix of gods and monsters with Stephen King’s formidable depth. Not every writer makes real people out of inkblots. And that’s fine when you’ve got too many people coming and going in your head and can’t keep track of them. What you want then is something totally engrossing and totally gross. The amateur amputation scene, for example, is just what the doctor ordered. The kids, stranded in the middle of Mayan nowhere, try to keep poor Pablo alive by sawing off his infected legs. Dude broke his back falling into the centre of the earth, where the killer vines whisper and laugh and gobble up your vomit, shit, and blood. They made a good drumstick dinner of the dude before his pals rigged up the above plan to save him.

It was also totally atmospheric to feel the isolation of this jaw of hell that the poor students were lured to during their Mexican vacation. They follow a German tourist to an archeological dig, searching for his missing brother. Turns out the haunted hill is a graveyard: a sort of Mayan Hotel California. They find the German’s brother, all right, in the same condition they are all fated for. A skeleton, with vines growing through his eye sockets.

Sure, all of this made for some tremendous tension and a few interesting dreams where National Geographic met Ten Little Indians. But a little bit more local colour would have been fitting. You’re already in the jungle, at a site of the ruins of a Mayan temple. Here’s where you could insert a bunch of interesting research on curses or human sacrifices or ancient cult customs. Throughout the whole book, I kept thinking that the answer was obvious: if the group would sacrifice one to the vines, the rest could go free. That would be a solution that could be creepy, save a few of the characters, and get some interesting folklore in. But I doubt the writer did much more to research his story than look at a map and plunk down a random destination. The killer vines could truly have been in Brazil, Germany, or Yemen.

The verdict? I bet Scott Smith develops into a real thriller- he’s got a soothing and eerie flow to his writing, and I’m certain with experience he’s going to freak the daylights right out of us while actually digging in the dirt for some background. But for now, it’s a shallow grave- take it or leave it.

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Sam Bourne’s The Righteous Men

Five years from now I won’t even remember that I read Sam Bourne’s The Righteous Men, but so what? Not every book has to change your life.

I’d been longing for another page turning religious thriller in the post-Da Vinci Code era. While there were dozens of possible ‘spin-offs’ to choose from, none held my attention past page four, and most were blatantly parroting the exact same themes. I mean, how lame is it to write another whole novel using Da Vinci? Try another artist, at the very least…while there is nothing new under the sun, a tiny bit of originality surely goes a long way.

Bourne’s first novel, complete with banal sentiments, kidnapped wife, and an implausible plot was still a book I devoured cover-to-cover. Throw in an unusual Hasidic Judaism movement in Crown Heights, New York, a NY Times reporter who is a link to the possible Moshiach (Messiah), some ancient Kabalistic legends, a dead pimp, a weird Christian sect, and an ex-girlfriend with curves to there. What an adventure.

Some of the puzzle solving is indeed a bit of a stretch. Bourne can spin a good yarn, but doesn’t yet have the mastery to make you really care about the characters. I couldn’t have cared less, really, if the kidnapped wife was ever returned, and I never felt real affection for Will, the main character, or his amazing father, who handily is a judge. I was never turned on by the ex-girlfriend and felt the rabbis were a rather wooden lot. But nonetheless, it was still compulsive reading, and I always love a few religious legends thrown in. Religion has always been a fascinating panorama of human behaviour, and too much or too little of it seem to be bad news. Without any, stress levels skyrocket. With too much, weird obsessive fixations are seeded. Religion is also the distinguishing element between cultures and generations. Other people’s religion always seems bizarre, and puzzling out what the cues mean explains so much about them. The details of rituals make for great reading, and I’ve always been partial to a good Catholic mystery, with stained glass and flickering candles and corrupt priests and banished sinners. The sterile Protestant world I grew up in did not have luxuries like rosary beads and saints and weeping statues, so I always found fascination in a good Catholic plot. Now that all of the intriguing Catholic storylines have been done to death, what’s girl to do?

It takes a very imaginative writer to find conspiracy theories, Messianic plots, and global murder blue prints in the legends of the Torah and other Hasidic books. Bourne introduces the kabala and only refers to Madonna once. While his character sketches and the plausibility of the plot are definitely suffering a little, he does bring alive the studious world of Jewish theology and makes the reader curious to learn more. The title Righteous Men refers to an ancient belief that righteousness and justice can cloak itself into invisibility in a simple man (never a woman, of course) – or even a sinner man. And you’ll wonder if Jesus ripped off that bit about angels disguised as convicts or whatever it was. In any event, it brought to mind Peter’s letter: “Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.” (1 Peter 4:8). And as it turns out, for all his malevolence of trade, the pimp was a very nice guy.

Lorette C. Luzajic – read more of my work through www.thegirlcanwrite.net. Check out my other blog at www.thegirlcanwrite.wordpress.com.