My #FridayReads plans were changed by an unexpected piece of news: reading for Halloween Bingo starts on Sunday, not on Tuesday as I’d expected.

So I’ve adjusted my week’s reading to include my first two Halloween Bingo books, which I’ll read from Sunday onwards, and a spooky Audible Original novella for me to snack on in the meantime.

‘Second Skin‘ by Christian White (2020)

As a warm-up for my Halloween reading I’ve picked, ‘Second Skin’ an Audible Original novella thats about re-incarnation and guilt. Our main character is still in mourning when he meets a nine-year-old girl who claims to be the reincarnated spirit of his late wife. It sounds spooky and intense.

So far, I’ve been enjoying the Audible Originals novellas. They’re short but intense and they give me a chance to sample the work of writers I haven’t yet read.

‘Second Skin’ is by Christian White, an Australian writer whose debut novel ‘The Nowhere Child’, a story about a woman who is told that she was the child in a famous abduction case, is in my TBR pile.

‘The Silent Girls’ by Erik Rickstad (2014)

Eric Rickstad is an American writer with four thrillers to his name. ‘The Silent Girls’ is his best known novel. It tells the story of a retired cop turned PI who has moved to a rural small town to raise his daughter in peace, only to find himself involved in an investigation into missing girls.

I’ve chosen ‘The Silent Girls’ for the ‘Sleepy Hollow’ square as it’s set in Eric Rickstand’s home environmnet, rural Vermont.

‘After The Fall, Before The Fall, During The Fall’
by Nancy Kress (2012)

Nancy Kress has been a favourite author of mine since I read her Hugo and Nebula winning novella ‘Beggars In Spain’ back in the 1990s. She’s written thirty-three books, including twenty-six novels, four collections of short stories, and three books on writing. Her work has won six Nebulas, two Hugos, a Sturgeon, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.

I’ve selected her novella, ‘After The Fall, Before The Fall, During The Fall’ to read for the wonderfully named Dystopian Hellscape square.

The novella starts with the rather bleak prosepect that, by 2035, after a series of ecological disasters, the last surviving twenty-six humans will be kept by aliens in a kind of sterile zoo dome. The strange title arises from the way the story is told, taking us along three timelines to see how this disaster might or happen or how it might be averted. That sounds like a dystopian Full House to me.