SOURCE: The Ruins (2006) by Scott Smith

DESCRIPTION: "This clearing wasn't a field. It looked like a road...On the far side of it rose a small hill. The hill was rocky, oddly treeless, and covered with a sort of vinelike growth--a vivid green, with hand-shaped leaves and tiny flowers. The plant spread across the entire hill, clinging so tightly to the earth that it almost seemed to be squeezing it in its grasp. The flowers looked like poppies, the same size and color: a brilliant stained-glass red." (The Mountain Ruins by Scott Smith)

NOTES: The Plant lives on a hill in the Mexican jungle eleven kilometers outside Coba. The local Mayans act as guardians, keeping the plant on the hill, providing it with sacrificial victims. Anyone who touches the plant is forced to go up the hill and die there. The Mayans contained the mysterious plant long ago and keep it from spreading. No animals, including insects, will go near the hill. The plant covers the hill inside and out. It will try to lure victims inside the old mining shaft at the hill's center. The plant is vampiric, sucking the blood from its victims. It's vines have the power to grab and hold victims. It can lure its victims with mimicry, sounding like a person's voice or a cell phone. It does this by vibrating the stamen of its flowers. The sap of the plant is highly corrosive. The plant uses it to burn through ropes or barriers, also to dissolve skin and flesh. The plant can contaminate the body of its victims, invading it with worm-like tendrils. These can be cut from the victim but contamination is almost impossible to stop.

HISTORY: Smith uses several techniques invented by William Hope Hodgson (likely inspiration). He creates a bottleneck (the hill) and has monsters slowly creep up on the victims, taking over their very bodies. See Hodgson's Infectious Mold from "A Voice in the Night" (1907). The physical look of the plants is similar to Robert E. Howard's Blood-Sucking Vines from "The Garden of Fear" (1934). The film version of the novel changes many smaller details around but is fairly accurate. The hill becomes a Mayan temple.

Amy and Stacy deep inside the hill.