Scott Smith--and Carter A. Smith, The Ruins (2006 and 2008): Scott Smith's novel fits well into the now-burgeoning "American tourists menaced by foreign things in general" sub-genre, with a cast of four attractive young collegians on vacation in Cancun who decide to investigate the recent disappearance of a casual acquaintance's brother (?). Their journey takes them into mainland Yucatan and a mysterious archeological site with a horrible secret. Once they're at the site, the locals won't let them leave... While the leads aren't really that sympathetic, their plight and increeasing paranoia is well-rendered, although the latter is done at such talky, excruciating length that it nearly neutralizes any pathos the reader might feel. It's competent enough, but I really couldn't understand what the big deal was, apart from an inventively grisly moment involving bodily fluids (yes, it's one of those). The reviews seemed to treat The Ruins as some kind of reinvention of the horror novel, when the Lost Patrol trope's old as the hills and the concept of its central threat has been well-plumbed in various ways by several writers, including John Wyndham and even yours truly (in a story I had in The First BHF Book of Horror Stories which I wrote back in 2004). In the end, The Ruins is a decent story, but the time Smith takes to tell it and the encrusted hype make it difficult to truly enjoy. Fortunately, Carter A. Smith's surprisingly not-bad movie manages a serviceable end-run around the novel's shortcomings, though the moral of the story seems to be in many ways "never go anywhere with anyone who looks and sounds like John Phillip Law." The central threat, while a time-honored trope (and deservedly so--it's creepy as hell), is brilliantly realized by what I assume to be CGI, and the circumstances surrounding it are fairly fresh. The male characters do well enough, but the heroines are as appealing a pair of horror protagonists as I recently remember. I'm willing to see just about anything featuring the lovely and fiendishly talented Jena Malone (and occasionally pay the price, as with the lukewarm Saved and the wretched Life As A House), but the gorgeous Laura Ramsey's nearly as good (better, according to the excellent review in the Detroit Metro Times--again proving its superiority to the obnoxious Entertainment Weekly), and "does terror" extremely well. In the end, The Ruins wasn't anything especially groundbreaking, but was certainly an improvement on an overhyped novel.  

V.C. Andrews, Flowers In The Attic (1979): It took me forever to get around to reading Andrews' modern "classic," probably because of its (well-deserved) hokey Gothic, Dark Shadows reputation. Now more amenable to that sort of thing, I had a crack at it after reading a few friends' negative comments. It's listed in the Ann Arbor District Library catalog as a "teen novel," and it's one hell of a kinky one. Four profoundly annoying children (the grotesquely prim cadences of the elder two reminded me of Zoey Dean) enjoy a relatively idyllic life with their hardworking father and Corinne, their princessy mother, until the former dies in a car crash. Corinne, whose extravagant lifestyle has led to a crisis in their financial affairs, takes her brood to live with her fabulously wealthy parents in Virginia. Once they arrive, however, things go sour. The grandfather, a demented old coot who's ignorant of his grandchildren's existence, informs Corinne that the only reason he hasn't disinherited her is because she hasn't had children (he'd opposed her marriage for reasons that become starkly apparent throughout the novel). The grandmother learns of the children and agrees to keep the secret, albeit by keeping the kids locked up in a set of attic rooms for what turn into years. As time goes by, the children learn that all isn't what it seems. Frequent whippings and incest can add an agreeably grotesque twist to a story, and Corinne, at least, is a memorably realized character, but it's all so overdone and unintentionally comical (and less suited to the latter than similar stories) that the end comes as a blessed relief.