Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury (3.5 stars)

"By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes". Such a great title. More dark fantasy than horror, I was put off early in the novel when Bradbury tries way too hard to make sure you know the carnival is evil, and really scary....mmmmmkay?

So the maze waited, its cold gaze ready, for so much as a bird to come look, see, and fly away shrieking. But no bird came.

NO BIRD CAME. But anyway, it actually recovers and does get creepy, once some events have caught up with all the foreshadowing. Bradbury's writing is often poetic:

Times come when troughs, not tables, suit our appetites.

quite surrealist:

Outside, a weather of stars ran clear in an ocean sky.

and occasionally I just found it nonsensical:

Why are some people all grasshopper fiddlings, scrapings, all antennae shivering, one big ganglion eternally knotting, slip-knotting, square-knotting themselves? They stoke a furnace all their lives, sweat their lips, shine their eyes and start it all in the crib. Caesar's lean and hungry friends. They eat the dark, who only stand and breathe.

WAT? I dig weirdness and don't mind being confused while reading, but this type of thing broke the flow of the story for me a few times.

The father, Charles Halloway, has all of the best dialogue, which is not surprising since the two protagonists are children. His heart-to-heart with Will in the library where he tries to impart some wisdom in terms the kids will understand was quite moving, and my favourite part of the whole novel:

Could he say love was, above all, common cause, shared experience? That was the vital cement, wasn't it?

My favourite creepy moment was Will's encounter with the Dust Witch's balloon over his house:

...he saw her squinched blind-sewn eyes, the ears with moss in them, the pale wrinkled apricot mouth mummifying the air it drew in, trying to taste what was wrong with his act, his thought.

Overall, creepy carnival just seemed a bit too cliche to me: perhaps if I'd read this in 1962 I wouldn't be quite so jaded. I also took issue with Jim and Will's first encounter with the carnival: they 'killed' Cooger and got away far too easily given how powerful Dark and the Dust Witch are later in the novel.

A couple of reviewers mentioned they thought the movie (screenplay also written by Bradbury) was actually much more impressive than the novel. I'll have to check it out.

3.5 stars.

Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption by Laura Hillenbrand (4.5 stars)

Unbroken has been on my reading list ever since I was completely surprised by how much I loved Seabiscuit, not to mention it is also one of the all-time highest rated books on amazon. In fact, it was Hillenbrand's research for Seabiscuit that led her to discover Louie Zamperini, whose story was all over the 1950s newspapers she was reading for Seabiscuit.

Zamperini's story is simply amazing. I was expecting a fairly normal life story before getting to the piece about flying in a bomber in WWII, but Louie's story is fascinating even from childhood. He stages a mind-boggling number of practical jokes and pranks in his youth, goes on to break a series of running records, and competes in the 1936 Berlin Olympics where he meets Hitler and steals a German flag off the Reich Chancellery! All of this before we even get to the main part of the story.

A standout for me from the section about Louie's pranks and criminal activities during his youth was when Hillenbrand mentions eugenics and Louie's realisation that he was in danger of sterilization or worse:

Louie was never more than an inch from juvenile hall or jail, and as a serial troublemaker, a failing student, and a suspect Italian, he was just the sort of rogue that eugenicists wanted to cull. Suddenly understanding what he was risking, he felt deeply shaken.

I found this deeply shocking as I was completely unaware of America's extensive eugenics movement, sterilization laws, and influence on Nazi eugenics.

Another section that fascinated me was the description of WWII defences in San Francisco. Having lived in the area for a number of years it is amazing to think of mines at the entrance to the bay, a submarine net, and trenches along the coast.

In America, invasion was expected at any moment. Less than an hour after the Japanese bombed Hawaii, mines were being laid in San Francisco Bay....In coming days, trenches were dug along the California coast, and schools in Oakland were closed.

Also surprising was hearing about the significance of Nauru in WWII, known recently to all Australians as a hell-hole of an immigration detention centre. The Japanese took it in August 1942, mined the rich phosphate for munitions, and used it as a base to launch air strikes. Louie has a miraculous escape after bombing Nauru, returning to land with 594 holes in his airplane, some larger than his head.

No less astonishing is Louie's tale of survival on a life raft adrift in the Pacific. He survives simultaneous attacks from sharks and strafing from a Japanese fighter by diving under the raft and punching the sharks. No kidding. They also beat off sharks with the raft's oars and stab one in the eye with a pair of pliers.

Four more times the Japanese strafed them, sending Louie into the water to kick and punch at the sharks until the bomber had passed.

Honestly there were a number of moments in this book where I felt like it may have been exaggerated a little, the above is one of them. While I think the book was very well researched, large parts would have been based solely on Louie's descriptions and essentially impossible to verify.

But overall it is a fantastic read, and one of the most amazing stories to emerge from WWII. Louie's treatment in various POW camps is beyond horrible and yet he, somehow, remains unbroken.

Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man's soul in his body long past the point at which the body should have surrendered it. The loss of it can carry a man off as surely as thirst, hunger, exposure, and asphyxiation, and with greater cruelty.

4.5 stars