Scott Smith - The Ruins

Like, I suspect, many a reader, my interest in The Ruins was first sparked by the Stephen King quote on the cover. The best horror novel of the new century, King says. High praise indeed. Smith does, in fact, lay a superb foundation for an excellent horror novel. Unfortunately, he never gets past the foundations.

Enjoying a vacation in the Mexican sun, two American couples lounge on the beach and party with their fellow tourists. Though none of them speak Greek, they befriend three Greeks. And they befriend a German man named Mathias. Mathias says he has a brother, but they haven't seen him. When they grow to know Mathias better, he tells them that that brother went to an archaeological dig and hasn't been back since. The group, looking to help and looking for a great day amidst the ruins, agree to head out to the site to see what happened. The journey's ominous. Eleven miles down a jungle road, and the driver warns them off the whole time. When they reach the hill the dig's atop, they find the armed denizens of the nearby Mayan village at its base. When they dare to put a foot on the vine covered hill, the Mayans refuse to let them down. Before long, they find the decomposed corpses along the hill's bottom, shot through with arrows as they tried to flee. The tourists are trapped, and, needless to say, things only get worse from there.

The vine, they come to realize, is at the center of it all. It's not just omnipresent, not just absurdly fast growing. It doesn't only feast on dead flesh. The vine is malevolent. Worse, it moves. It thinks. The vine is trying to destroy them. It lays traps. It stretches out to devour any blood they spill. It crawls into their wounds. It makes the sound of laughter. It begins to speak, imitating their voices to drive them apart. One of the tourists, Eric, is even sure that it's inside him, growing in the cavity in his chest, shoving his organs aside as it strengthens.

Quarantined by jailors they can't hope to plead with, trapped with an impossible menace that seeks their death, the characters and the reader discover that the hot Yucatan sun is no barrier to claustrophobia.  Early on, Eric begins to ask: Who are they? (p. 28) He doesn't just mean the Mayans outside. He doesn't just mean the Greek and the German that they're with. He doesn't even just mean his friends. No, even Eric himself is now a mystery to the question's asker. Here, pushed to and past the brink of sanity, the characters discover things about themselves and each other that they wouldn't have thought possible. Quickly, they diverge into two groups. One, led by and sometimes only consisting of Jeff, is always planning, always ready to take any measures aimed at survival, no matter how grotesque or futile. The rest don't have his nerve. Or, alternatively, don't have his inhumanity.

Agency seems the chief question. Early on, before the troubles reach their peak, one character thinks back to how a relative of theirs cautioned them against simply reacting until, one day, they realized they had let life pass them by. It's necessary to plan, that relative cautions them. Planning, always planning – because that was what it meant to be alive (p. 422), one character eventually concludes. But such planning is rendered impotent by the constricting vines. Destiny is not in the characters' hands. At best, Jeff can struggle to stay alive for just a few days longer. Escape, the ultimate questions of life and death, are not in their hands.

Amidst all this, Smith's prose is not flashy but is often quite good, especially when it comes to the creation of specific and horrific images, the best of which is, I believe, the following: He believed that if he were to cut himself at this spot, just the smallest of incisions, the plant would tumble outward into the light, smeared with his blood, like some horrific newborn, writhing and twisting its flowers opening and closing, a dozen tiny mouths begging to be fed. (p. 300) The characters begin hard to tell apart, and the women could have used more differentiation, but Jeff and Eric both come off extremely well, the former characterized by his utter determination and the latter by his perpetual and ultimately mad wordgames, making increasingly frightened word chains that begin with a certain letter, such as: Dreaming, delirium, dying… (p. 300) Mathias, too, has a quiet strength about him, one that promises powerful things to come.

All of this potential – the set up, the claustrophobia, the questions of planning and identity, the characters – isn't so much squandered as let sit. Having laid the groundwork, Smith proceeds to capitalize on none of it, and it was in the last few pages of the novel that I realized my worst fears were going to come true – none of it was going anywhere. The Ruins is at once far too long and far too short. At 500 pages, it is a fair bit longer than the average horror novel. By switching among perspectives, Smith is able to keep the tension up for most of that length, but, at some point, the reader stops and wonders what's happened and where it's all going. And while The Ruins had five hundred pages worth of buildup, it has none at all of answers, climax, or development.

The chief problem with it all is the abrupt ending, coming from nowhere to slay the whole cast without any dignity or, save in one fantastic case, any climax. The buildup of interpersonal tension, of questions of what survival is worth morally, of different plans – all of that goes nowhere. After the fairly early revelation that it is not only malevolent but sentient, the vine goes nowhere. Its origins remain an utter mystery. It has some grand evil plan for the characters' demise, we are told, but things never come to that point, and it comes to nothing. All of the rising tension and promises Smith makes add up to nothing. The climax could have been slotted in at page two hundred without significant alteration.

Perhaps because of his quote on the cover, The Ruins invites comparisons to Stephen King. Specifically, in my mind, to some of the stories in Skeleton Crew. One gets the sense that Smith is attempting to be the collection's highpoint, "The Mist": an epic in terms of impact and emotion, even if confined to a single area, a statement about man's purpose and abilities in the face of inevitability and the world beyond him. He doesn't quite make it. In addition, The Ruins seems to be striving to be "Survivor Type," the horrific tale of a man who will do absolutely anything to survive. But the characters in The Ruins are never pushed to that point; though disaster is perpetually looming, and though Jeff makes grim statements, they are never actually made to face the consequences of their hard decisions.

Ultimately, the King story that most resembles The  Ruins is "The Raft". In both, young Americans (joined in the novel by nicely exotic foreigners) enter a seemingly innocuous area for relaxation and are relentlessly pursued, hemmed in, and then slaughtered by an utterly inexplicable force. In my review of Skeleton Crew, I said that The Raft was "extremely enjoyable," and it was. It was darkly claustrophobic, filled with inevitability and doom, and it didn't overstay its welcome. The first two certainly apply to The Ruins. The last one, not so much. It's not that the formula doesn't work for Smith. It does. Most of The Ruins is suspenseful and well done. It's just that he doesn't hit a single note that King doesn't, and he takes more than ten times as long to hit those notes. Without anything (anything at all) else thrown in, the story can't sustain itself over that kind of expansion. It's not so much weak as it is empty, desperately needing either an additional hundred pages to fulfill every promise and leave the reader stunned by its power or a pruning of two or three hundred pages to function as a lean and mean blow to the gut.

As is, The Ruins isn't bad at all, and you'll certainly be entertained while reading it. But it doesn't break any new ground, and, no matter how important an ancient mine shaft may be to the story, it doesn't go deeply enough at all into its own well trodden soil to justify itself.  An acceptable horror novel? Sure, I'll give it that. Best of the new century? Not even close.

Stephen King - Skeleton Crew

I've often heard that Stephen King's as good a writer of short stories as he is of novels, or – from some – that he's even better in that form, but my one experience with the man's short fiction, Everything's Eventual, did anything but confirm that opinion. Still, Everything's Eventual collected stories written relatively late in the man's career, and, as I've now said many times on this blog, all of the man's later works have failed to live up to his earlier, in my opinion. So we come to Skeleton Crew, the second collection from the man that many consider the greatest of all horror writers, and the man that – if the bibliography in this very volume's to be believed – is not only the bestselling horror author but the best selling author of all time. Does the collection live up to the man's reputation? Yes and no, really. Almost everything here's at least enjoyable, but there are two or three or more limpers for every homerun. But, of course, those homeruns sure can fly.

One of the things that I found most interesting in the collection is that many – though certainly not all – of the stories here are of a very different kind of horror from what King generally writes.  For a while now I've divided horror into two general groups: stories where the horror comes from the characters/humanity, such as the majority of King's work (The Shining, Pet Semetary, etc), and then stories where the horror comes from the unknowable world around the characters, Weird Fiction ala Lovecraft. Many stories here fall into that latter category, The Mist foremost among them. The Mist is, of course, the highest profile story here, initially released in the horror superstar anthology Dark Forces and, more recently, made into a movie and, as a result, released as a brief standalone volume (though why that would improve on the collection I've no idea). The reasons for the story's success and prevalence are damn easy to see: put simply, The Mist is one of King's best tales.

As always, King proves himself an incredible writer of people. Our narrator, David, and his wife and son are forced to huddle away from a ferocious summer storm. As they do, King humanizes each of them with quirks of diction and action, as well as the touching and believable ways that they interact with one another. Later, King extends that to the story's secondary characters, often establishing entire personalities with only a line or two, like when the narrator explains that he didn't care for Bud Brown, who seemed to fancy himself the Charles de Gaulle of the supermarket world (p. 51) or one of the descriptions of Mrs. Carmody: The easiest [person] to pick out was Mrs. Carmody in her blazing-yellow pantsuit. She looked like an advertisement for yellow fever. (p. 54)

The story proper gets started as a mist begins to approach from a nonsensical direction, a mist so dense that nothing can be glimpsed from within. As it comes, David and his son are, along with much of the town's population, in the only nearby supermarket, and it's there that they're trapped, for strange and horrible creatures walk the mist, monstrosities made up of tentacles and monolithic size that have turned the mist-drowned world into an alien hell unimaginable. The mist is change inescapable and catastrophic, and the heart of the story is the way that the ensemble cast reacts. Some collapse in despair, others refuse to believe what they be, blind themselves with regulations and routine, or try and escape their situation by fixating on an increasingly malevolent god.

Amidst all this, though, King refuses to give in to defeatism. His writing is dark, often and in this case punishingly so, but he still will not let go of the worth he sees in humanity. Carrying the fire was a very big deal for him, the narrator writes of his son. It helped him forget about being afraid. (p. 28) And it does more than that; by the end, the characters are, for all that they know, alone, and it's only their will that keeps them and all going. But King's optimism is not a blind one, and his triumphs are never easy or certain. I know that I've very often criticized the man's endings, but the ambiguous final scene of The Mist is absolutely perfect, filled at once with hope and horror in equal measures.

If The Mist challenges King's optimism, Survivor Type does its best to hack it off with a buzz saw. This  is a story of human determination, and, while reading, it's almost impossible to not think that, sometimes, it goes too far. But, as the narrator says, the only mortal sin is giving up. (p. 423) As we begin, the narrator's trapped on an island, alone and with no food. His fate seems sealed, but he disagrees and will always disagree. The center of the story soon becomes this question: How much shock-trauma can the patient stand? (p. 407) And the answer: How badly does the patient want to live? (p. 407) Well, our narrator wants to live very badly indeed, and, as the tale progresses, is forced to cut off and eat his own limbs to survive. This is a sickening story, that I won't deny, but it's written so compellingly, and with an undercurrent of the most perverted idealism, that it's impossible to ever look away. I won't be forgetting this one for a while, and I dare say you won't be either.

Beachworld, The Raft, and The Monkey are also tales of man facing an inevitable fate in an uncaring world. The first two are both extremely enjoyable, but The Monkey proves more perplexing. Essentially, the ending destroys the metaphor the story's built on. We begin as the main character sees his sons playing with a windup monkey toy that he had in his childhood. His reaction, one of abject terror, confuses them. The monkey, as we found out, dominated his youth as it clanged its cymbals together to signal each death around him. Now it's returned, and he sees it as tragedy returning to savage his idyllic life. Now, it must be stressed that the monkey itself does not kill its victims; it's not some cheap monster movie villain. No, the monkey merely clangs as they die from seemingly unrelated means. The monkey, it seems, is death, its shadow over each and every tragedy in the narrator's life. And yet, at the story's end, the protagonist succeeds in throwing the monkey into a lake, and the monkey – which has, for the entire story, been built up as a personification of death itself – is gone for good this time. […] The monkey would not be back to draw a shadow over Dennis's life or Petey's. (p. 195) So the narrator just killed death? Huh?

Of the other types of tales present, the most forgettable are generally the shortest and most violent. Here There Be Tygers is a quick story whose only event of note is the teacher being slaughtered by a tiger, but Cain Rose Up takes the cake in this category, a brief but bloody piece in which a student massacres his classmates. These certainly contain horror, but they don't make us care, and, without that, the horror's just spectacle. Most, however, are better than that, even if a fair few are competent horror like Word Processor of the Gods that show up, have a decent time, and then fade away without leaving much of an impression.

A few of the stories here distinguish themselves more in the manner of their telling than in the events told, primarily Mrs. Todd's Shortcut, The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands, and The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet. By far the most successful is the last of those just listed. The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet is a conversation between an editor, an agent, a writer, and the writer's wife, and it focuses on a story of insanity that the editor received. Of course, the editor – and King behind him – admits that the one thing the American reading public doesn't need foisted upon them is another story about Going Mad Stylishly in America […] But this story was funny. I mean, it was really hilarious. (p. 500) And so it is. The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet is absurd, simply told, and damn fun to read.

Alas, the other two frame-focused don't work nearly as well. The Man Who Would Not Shake Hands is a genteel story too proper in its telling to allow much humor beyond a polite nod and too vague and insubstantial to be particularly affecting. Mrs. Todd's Shortcut, on the other hand, is an interesting but far from exceptional tale about driving off the map and the addictions and dangers therein. In both cases, the cumbersome nature of their back and forth telling delays what satisfaction there is long past the point of sustainability, drowning their already meager cores with verbiage that's adequately written but does little or nothing to excite.

But I'm just getting lost in the details and the negatives. Those stories I've just pointed out and criticized? There are flaws in all of 'em, flaws – a tendency to excess, sentimentalism, and/or what have you – but you know what else? They're (almost) all still involving tales, and you can bet that goes double for those I didn't critique and triple for those I praised. King can make you care with a line, can pen a character like almost no one else, can draw you in with irrelevancies and keep you there with quirks and mannerisms and realities like nobody else. It's great when King generates dread thick enough for you to drown in, when he makes you laugh, and when he pens the human race's condition and downfall in a hundred page novella. But all of that's superfluous to his real charm, and, even in his weakest tales, even as King's pacing and construction and themes fall down and fall away, it's still damn hard to look away from the page and from the character's that he's so excellently birthed from nothing at all.

Skeleton Crew is like Stephen King's career in miniature. It's got a huge amount of work, all of which makes you care, almost all of which is decent,, with the occasional burst of brilliance so radiant it justifies every unnecessary word in the pieces that surround it. This is, without a doubt, worth purchasing for The Mist, and I can promise that you'll have a good time with just about all the rest, even if damn few of them will still be kicking around in your skull two weeks later at the least expected moments.

Standouts: The Mist, Survivor Type, The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet