All four are enjoying some time on the beach, getting drunk and lolling in the sun. The setting, of course, is paradise, because there’s nothing like inverting the joy of being young, attractive, and in Mexico with the unspeakable terror of being hunted by something inexplicable and perhaps supernatural. Young people, ostensibly good looking, find themselves in a wee bit of trouble. Almost from the start it filled me with dread, creating a weird tension as I longed to read on and hesitated to read on. Anyway, The Ruins isn't frightening, but it is horrific. What can I say? I'm old, and I'm starting to recognize all the things I don't get. Yes, I recognize this should be self-evident, that legions of youngsters flocking to Eli Roth's torture-porn oeuvre knew this intuitively. At least not in the BOO! sense of the word. To be successful, horror doesn’t need to scare you. That I was grading horror on the wrong scale. While reading Scott Smith’s The Ruins, it occurred to me that my concept of horror is wrong, or at least strikingly narrow. After all, no monster springing from an author’s imagination is quite so terrifying as my student debt load.

Real life itself is so terrifying that fictional fears really don’t do anything for me. Did this scare me? Mostly, the answer is no. So that’s how I’ve judged various entries in the field.

I’ve always had this conception that the horror genre, be it books or movies, are meant to be scary. And everywhere, hanging like bells from the vines, were those brilliant bloodred flowers…” In some places, they grew thinly enough that Eric could glimpse the soil underneath – rockier than he would’ve expected, dry, almost desertlike – but in others, they seemed to fold back upon themselves, piling layer upon layer, forming waist-high mounds, tangled knoll-like profusions of green. “The vines covered everything but the path and the tent’s orange fabric.

The Ruins by Scott Smith