The Ruins
By Scott Smith
Knopf, 319 pages
words It starts the same way every time.
An interchangeable group of Young Americans, on a rowdy bacchanal in a Foreign Paradise, stumbles across Something They Shouldn’t. Ignoring all the obvious warnings, they Venture Where They Daren’t and end up unleashing a Supernatural Horror that proceeds to dispatch them with increasing gruesomeness. Rinse, recycle and repeat.
Is Scott Smith toying with these conventions in his newest novel, The Ruins? Possibly, but little commentary can be found amidst the typical burden of such a standard narrative. Complete with its manufactured Americans (Stacy, Jeff, Eric, Amy), its foreign paradise (a holiday in Mexico), and its reckless venture into the jungle depths, The Ruins follows the standard horror tropes with unwavering fidelity.
Smith’s previous novel, A Simple Plan, operated within a similar genre (the mystery novel), yet amped up the stakes with an engrossing plot and pitch-perfect tension. With his follow-up novel, however, the trajectory is depressingly simple: Four college graduates with nothing to do follow a German tourist, who is searching for his brother near the site of Mayan ruins. Once there, they find themselves stranded on a mysterious hill flowing with vibrant undergrowth, trapped between armed Mayan villagers who Know Secrets We Don’t and sentient vines that are, of course, hungry for human flesh and blood.
If you’re going to bury yourself within the conventions of the horror novel, the first lesson is this: Make sure your Supernatural Horror is worthy of 300 pages of character-crunching physical and emotional trauma. Smith’s ravenous vines, unfortunately, don’t quite pass the test. Yes, they’re aggressive and everywhere: They “fold back upon themselves, piling layer upon layer, forming waist-high mounds, tangled knoll-like profusions of green. And everywhere, hanging like bells from the vines, were those brilliant bloodred flowers.” They slither, scrape, slurp, mimic smells and voices, and inflict their fair share of pain. But, in the end, they’re still just plants—fodder at best for a short story.
That being said, The Ruins taps into that primal essence of horror novels: the blatantly grotesque. Reading like a survival narrative by Stephen King, Smith’s horrific tale is full of blood-drips and spatters, self-mutilations and amateur amputations, all written with a clinical detail that the squeamish will read through winced eyes. Still, when these charisma-free dummies get drunk off tequila during a life-threatening crisis, readers can indulge in their horrible fates without remorse. After all, as one rapscallion notes during a rare moment of clarity: “They were fools, not survivors.”
—Zak M. Salih
Reprieve
Ani DiFranco
Righteous Babe Music
cd How you feel about the new Ani DiFranco album will probably depend entirely on the relationship you had with this riot-grrl icon before you pick it up. I remember gazing at a couple of waifish, identical-looking young women—cropped blonde hair, black-clad and tattooed, arms wrapped protectively around each other—outside the college chapel where Ani played the first time I saw her, a (gulp) decade ago; I’ve always thought of them as quintessential Ani fans. They were vulnerable, tough, and—in a niche way—very hip. And they, like the unapologetically feminist folksinger they were there to see, seemed like they could see right through everything.
Back then, Ani was like a wildfire spreading through the college music world, gathering young and mostly female devotees who idolized her independence, her anger, and her willingness (as one of my friends admiringly put it) to “sound ugly.” Now, 10 years later, she’s still pumping out albums at a steady annual rate, but who’s listening? Who’s memorizing them, growling/honking/whispering along with them, living by their quotable lyrics? “I ain’t in the best shape I’ve ever been in/But I know where I’m going/and it ain’t where I’ve been,” Ani sings on Reprieve.
There’s a (predictably self-conscious) sense here of having grown up. But “it ain’t where I’ve been” both is, and isn’t, true. The narcissistic patness of those lyrics is vintage Ani, as is Reprieve’s intense and moody ambience, political content and not-terribly-interesting use of sampling. If Reprieve is your first Ani album, you’ll probably feel like you’ve discovered a talented musician with a distinctive, individualistic style that encompasses folk, rock and jazz with a playful, theatrical ease. And if you’re an Ani fan from the old days, you’ll instantly recognize her way of building a melody, and the urgent rhythms of both her sung and spoken words.
You’ll also probably yawn—either because you’ve really, really heard this all before, and it frankly feels worn out, or because you’ll sense that Ani herself has long since let go of the fire that used to make this bag of tricks sound so relevant. On “Millennium Theater,” for example, she resorts to more or less naming things (Enron, icecaps, Yucca Mountain) and relying on her own musical and lyrical baggage to imply the relevant commentary. I imagine those two blonde lovers (or friends, or whatever) listening to Reprieve, and I see sneers on their faces. But then, they’re 10 years older now, too.—Erika Howsare
NCAA Football ‘07
Electronic Arts
Xbox
games Any respectable run-through of the latest pageantry-packed edition of Electronic Arts’ Saturday-afternoon special, NCAA Football ‘07, has to start with the Commonwealth Bowl. Gotta see if those scrappy Cavs can finally lay the smack to the hated Hokies, right?
Unfortunately, they couldn’t, losing a 24-14 nail-biter thanks to a late INT in heavy traffic—but that, plus a healthy sampling of the season and new “Campus Legend” mode, makes three things eminently clear:
This is the best-looking NCAA game ever. Even if you’re not calling plays on an Xbox 360 (see below), the stadium and player animations sparkle, and the ESPN presentation is as smooth as a Vince Young scramble.
The new “Momentum Meter” feature, which supposedly adds performance bonuses as you string together sweet plays, is (much like Marcus Vick) all flash and no substance. Even when Tech’s meter was three-quarters full, I was still routinely serving 40-yard laser beams into the Hokies’ secondary. Big Mo? More like big miss, if you ask me.
NCAA’s other new features basically amount to a wash. Trick plays and analog-control kicking are welcome, long-overdue additions to the feature arsenal, but the “Impact Camera” that slo-mo-zooms in on every long pass and bone-crunching tackle gets old after a single series. Unlike certain cyclists and pro baseball players, my adrenaline levels don’t need an artificial boost—so save the slo-mo special effects for the replay, please. (Oh, and one other thing: Lee Corso is a freakin’ loon—somebody certify this guy already.)
One final caveat: If you’re a 360 owner, you may want to take a pass on this year’s pricey pageantry. Especially since, like last year’s Madden ‘06, the next-gen versi
on
of NCAA 07 has the looks but not the books: The game actually contains fewer features (no “Campus Legend,” no trick plays) than its now-gen cousins. Pay more for less? I doubt there’s an athlete—or button-mashing couch potato—in the world who’d cheer for that.—Aaron R. Conklin
