Watching the quick-moving but grueling horror movie The Ruins [my original review is here] on its theatrical release — a bare three months ago! — was an intriguing enough experience that it sent me running immediately to grab a copy of the source novel that author Scott Smith adapted for the screen. Reading the book was somewhat confusing, since the characters’ fates were scrambled on the way to the multiplex and my brain struggled a little bit to keep the movie’s characters at bay as I dug into the novel. But it’s a more satisfying version of the story, owing largely to Smith’s literary tactic of shifting the narrative perspective, round-robin style, from character to character, a virtuoso move that the film (maybe wisely) doesn’t even consider emulating. The book lets you get far enough into the heads of its doomed characters — and telescopes the scope of the action across a long enough period of time — that their actions, and eventual insanity, become more understandable.

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