I hate to say this and I have only said this about 2 other novels...the movie was actually better. Just too drawn out at times.

The Ruins has been compared to Preston and Child's The Relic but I don't know why. This was one BORING story. The "build up" just went on entirly too long. Like a good scary read with monsters, mystery and a good plot?- skip The Ruins and run to The Relic or any of the books by Douglas Preston and Lincol Child.

Proceed directly to "Go." Do not waste an audio book credit on this one. I downloaded "The Ruins" based on Stephen King's enthusiastic response to the print version.
By the time I finished the audio book I felt misled and disappointed. Misled because, unless I missed something, Mayan ruins had next to nothing to do with the content of the book. A more appropriate title would have been "The Plant"; however, that name probably would not have resulted in books leaping off store shelves. Or perhaps, the name could have been "The Hill" or "The Clearing" as most of the story takes place on a hill within a clearing in the jungle with no ruins in sight.
The other major flaw of the book is that it would have been better suited to a short story rather than a full-length book. There just isn't enough there to sustain your interest. I was expecting a previously undiscovered run down, jungle encrusted Mayan settlement with some mysterious malevolent presence protecting it and perhaps a treasure as well. Okay, so my plot is predictable, but with a few twists it would have worked better than what the author chose to do. The author should have had chosen a more complicated "villain" in order to sustain the suspense and crank up the fear.
As in "A Simple Plan" I thought the character development was good, even very good most of the time. I felt the characters acted the way most people of their age and background would have acted in the same situation. The character development was definitely much better than the author's attempts at creating fear and suspense. The tensions that developed between the characters as the novel progressed was credible.
Too bad because I really enjoyed the author's previous work "A Simple Plan."

I listen to MANY horror and science fiction audiobooks. I picked this book out because I wanted to see the movie, but decided to listen to the book first. I've read many of the reviews for this audiobook and I can't get over how polarized they are. Either people love it or hate it. I guess I'm no different. I hated it.

I found the story to be completely boring and extremely predictable. There is almost no character development at all in the book. Instead of story and character development we are treated to juvenile one-dimensional women and overly macho one-dimenional men. There's even a section in the book where the characters discuss who is going to play them in the movie. Yeesh.

Without giving anything away, the 'evil force' was never scary.

I will say that I found the sadistic nature of the Mayans to be very objectionable.

For those of you who liked it, more power to you. However, I need more from my fiction than this author was willing to give. I need interesting characters and interesting situations. The author had the interesting situation, it's everything else that falls apart.

This was my first experience with this narrator, but I found him to be easy to listen to and he had very good tempo. He's the reason I'm rating this book with more than one star.

Based on listening to the book, I've decided to not see the movie.

I liked this book enough that several months after I read it, I purchased the audio book. I had not read the previous book written by this author and understand that it is a completely different animal (and I use the word animal very deliberately). This one scared me to death.

I can understand why some reviewers were frustrated with certain of the narrator's choices (ex. he speaks a part that is clearly sung by one character). Overall, though, I felt his tenor, flow, technique, and ability were more than able to carry the author's messages of fun, reckless abandon, carelessness, fear, terror, and ultimately hopelessness.

I liked the decision not to break up the narrative flow with chapter headings and thought the pacing was done well. Overall, I liked this narrator's take on the material.