Author Stephen King has gushed not once but twice about Scott Smith’s recently published terror spasm The Ruins in his column “The King of Pop” fin Entertainment Weekly. King has good reason to gush, both because The Ruins is a spanking good read (or listen, in this case) and because Smith has played Mozart to King’s Haydn in perfecting some of King’s most tried and true horror tools. Stephen King made a cottage industry of taking the mundane everyday and infusing it with a white-hot element of terror so potent that we can no longer look at St. Bernards, lawn art, or the summer lake trip in the same way. Smith takes King’s lead and runs with it… relentlessly.

Scott Smith was previously known for A Simple Plan, published in 1994 and adapted into a successful movie of the same title in 1999. That book focused on the psychology of guilt and secret-keeping, with the added elements of greed, sloth, and lust, all timely topics in King’s middle period.

The Ruins' closest King kin may be The Shining and, by extension, It. The plot centers on a vacation of young adults before returning to school, a circumstance so common that one could not imagine a vein of horror in it (allowing that such a scenario has been employed in countless teen exploitation movies). But that is the beauty of such writing. It only takes a minute psychic nudge to push circumstances to a feverpitch.

Smith’s story focuses on two American couples on holiday in Cancun, Mexico, a plain and common enough scenario. There, the Americans (Eric, Jeff, Amy, and Stacy) meet “The Greeks” (several Greek youths with no English or Spanish skills) and the German Matthias. They eat drink and lay around a lot until Matthias prepares to look for his brother, Heinrich, who recently disappeared after ostensibly visiting an archeological dig a day’s drive away. Eric, Jeff, Amy, and Stacy, one of the Greeks, Pablo, and Matthias leave Cancun, following a map left for Matthias by Hienrich directing him to an archeological site deep within Mexico’s interior, where Heinrich had gone before dropping of the face of the planet.