Unbelievable repeating; creepy, but unexciting. Characters uninteresting.

awful, boring, depressing, waste of time

This book was a waste of my time and credit. You wanted to scream - get to the point.

Like many reviewers of this book, this is the first book I've gotten from Audible in 4 years that was bad enough to compell me to write a review.

It could have been a short story, but through repetition and monotony it is a novel.

If I heard one more time the inner dialogue of one of the characters, as they do or say something stupid and unnecessary, describing how they knew they shouldn't but couldn't help themselves....

I spend much time in my car for work listening to audio books, well over 100 books so far. This is my choice for one of the worst books I have ever listened to. Tedious is an understatement. You know exactly how it is going to turn out and it takes forever to get there. It will make your drive seem longer rather than shorter.

This would make a great three disc set. Unfortunately it's 14 discs long. My second worst audio book purchase.

I had high hopes when I started this book, but soon realized that the author had devised such an impossible plot line that there was no way out. The characters were real and well written, but I soon found their problems increasingly difficult to listen to - particularly Eric and Pablo. When I got about halfway through I could see no way out and was correct. A long and very uncomfortable read.

Do not listen to the UNabridged version. It is verbose and terribly boring. The story line is barely okay!

What a waste of time - if not for a compulsion to finish what I start, I'd have turned it off half way through part one. What passes for a plot seems only to serve as a platform for the author to be gratuitously grotesque. If you want to read a book that lives up to this title, read Kate Mosse's "Labyrinth"

I can't believe Stephen King's hearty endorsement of this tome. One of the few "don'ts" in King's book "On Writing" is the use of sloppy adverbs, adverbs that appear in abundance in the The Ruins, like 'wetly", clumsily", "sleepily" and horror of all horrors "sexily". Just lazy writing.

However I thought the anthropormorphic vine and all its parodies of the pathetic human conversations it was in on, was a touch of genius and several times I found myself laughing out loud at its wit. I am not familiar with this genre, so a natural monster with a sense of humor and irony was quite a trip. So I'll give this one a three out of five, just for concept. I think of it every time I water my ivy plants or wisrteria.

I also thought the cold, calculating narration was an added bonus.