I love spooky stories.  Some of my very favorite authors write the best ones (I'm looking at you, King and Gaiman).  I am also a skeptic.  I read supposedly "real" accounts of ghosts and spirits and the like and I am completely unmoved.  But a fictional ghost story gets me every time.

I also love mysteries, so I was pretty excited when my mother recommended Help for the Haunted by John Searle.  A murder mystery of sorts, with all of the supernatural, paranormal creepiness I could want.  The narrator of the story, Sylvie, is the daughter of a pair of "spirit hunters".  They make their living giving talks at paranormal conventions, and helping people with hauntings.  After getting a strange phone call one snowy night, Sylvie and her parents leave the warmth of home for a cold dark of an empty church at midnight.  Before the night is over, both of her parents are dead, and Sylvie and her sister are left orphaned.

One year later, Sylvie is trying to deal with her grief over her parents' deaths, and to process her feelings about her own role in the events of that winter's evening.  She feels as though there is something important she is not remembering about what happened in that church, and she desperately wants to remember before the man accused of killing her mother and father go on trial.  Her sister, who is now her guardian, is no help, all anger and indifference and sarcasm.  And, the spooky events that used to plague her family during her parents' work have started happening again-dolls that appear where they shouldn't, lights that appear to turn on and off by themselves.  It's all too much, and Sylvie feels as though she will go crazy if she can't discover the truth.

I really enjoyed the mood of the whole book, up until the very end.  There is just enough creepy goodness to make you a little uncomfortable (in a good way, if you like that sort of thing) while you are reading (probably with the lights on).  But this is also a story about mothers and daughters, about faith vs. skepticism, and about trying to do right by people, even when you're not sure what "right" is. That said, I was disappointed in the ending.  Without giving anything away, I can confidently say that most readers of this book will be completely blindsided by the answer to the riddle of what happened that night in the church, not because Searle expertly crafts such a tight narrative that the clues are only obvious in hindsight, but because the clues are not really there to begin with.  While this isn't technically the right term for what I mean, the resolution to the story had a deus ex machina kind of feeling.  Something comes right out of left field that no one could have seen coming, which annoyed me on a certain level because it made the end feel disjointed, like the ending to another story. Or maybe I was just not paying enough attention (but I don't think so).  At any rate, I'd still recommend this book to anyone who likes a good scary story, or a good family story, or a good mystery story. It's a (mostly) satisfying read.

Unbroken, Laura Hillenbrand

There are no shortage of World War II stories in the world.  The Greatest Generation, fighting perhaps the last truly righteous war, came home from Europe and the Pacific and became our fathers,
grandfathers, uncles, and grumpy old neighbors.  American pop culture has seen plenty of images of D-Day, the liberation of the concentration camps, and the naval battles of the Pacific.  And we've begun, in small ways, to deal with our own shameful WWII history, when tens of thousands of American citizens, who happened to be Japanese, were rounded up and sent to internment camps.

But the story of Louis Zamperini, and the other men held as POWs in Japanese prisoner of war camps, is something new added to the long narrative of World War II and its aftermath.  If Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand, was a fictional tale, I would probably say it is unrealistic.  I mean, who would expect anyone to believe a story where survivors of a plane crash in the ocean survive for over 40 days drifting in a tiny raft in the Pacific, stalked by sharks, strafed by enemy aircraft, only to be "rescued" by the Japanese army and sent to prison camps, where the brutality shown them apparently knew no bounds?  Any one of them is a former Olympic athlete?  Yeah, right!

But this story is a true story, under the category of "you can't make this stuff up".  Hillenbrand's book tell the chilling story of Louis Zamperini and his fellow pilots, flying bombing runs in the Pacific theater in planes that were themselves almost as dangerous to the lives of the crew as the enemy.  To be honest, just the experiences of the men learning to fly these early war planes would have made a fascinating book.  I was routinely horrified by the way the US military used these patriotic, enthusiastic young men (boys, really) as fodder for the war machine that sprang to life when Japan bombed Hawaii.  But, of course, the real meat of the story is not about US military policy, but about the incredible struggle for survival that Louis and the other men who were stranded on that life raft endured in order to get back home.

What struck me most while reading this books was the lengths that the human mind will go to to preserve some shred of dignity in life.  Despite the filth, the disease, the hunger, and the impossibly inhuman treatment suffered by the prisoners, each in their own way tried to find some small act of resistance or independence that made them feel as though they were still human, still valuable, still worthy of life and respect.  Not every man was able to find a way to survive with sanity intact, but I  think it is a great testament to the human spirit that even when being treated like animals, Louis and many of the men in the camps with him persevered.  Of course, none of them left the experience without scars, both physical and mental.

Unless you live under a rock, you probably know that there is a movie of this book being released at Christmas.  (I will admit to finding the timing unusual, since it is not exactly the most heartwarming, uplifting story.)  I certainly plan to see it, but I am curious about one thing.  The last quarter of the book examines the effects that Louis' experiences had on his psyche, his physical health, and his relationships.  Will the movie?  Are we so averse as a country to thinking/talking/considering the terrible consequences of making men into soldiers that the movie will end with a triumphant rescue, or will the film explore the deep, lingering pain that these men brought home?  I certainly hope so.  I hope that Hillenbrand would not have released the rights to the book without the part that, to me, speaks the most to what we can do as a society to make sure that no one, not one more American soldier or airman or seaman or marine, has to experience the brutalities of war the way the men in this book did.