I knew this book had a lot of fans, but I didn't know what to expect and, for some inexplicable reason, didn't expect to love it this much. I was completely blown away by how fantastic and terrifying this book was, though. I cringed, I wanted to cry, I felt legitimate dread for these characters, and all the while, I was fully sucked in. I've been having a hard time getting totally pulled into stories lately, but I read this 500+ page book in 3 days, and it would have been less than that if I'd had more free time over that timespan.

Though shit hits the fan around the 20% mark, the build-up for The Ruins is a little bit slow, but it's worth every moment, because it introduces you to the cast of characters in such a way that they feel so real. They're very flawed, ultimately complex characters with a layer of authenticity that I don't see mirrored often by other horror authors; I felt like I could have known any one of these tourists, or could have even been one of them, and so I couldn't help but root for them right to the very end.

Above all else, there's a sense of bleakness and misery permeating this entire story that is inescapable, and it's all I could think about even when I wasn't reading, making it an incredibly unputdownable book that I feel will stick with me for a long time to come. The Ruins feels like a masterpiece of the genre and I am so glad that I finally experienced it for myself.