During September and October, most of my reading will be driven by playing Halloween Bingo, the aim of which is to ready twenty-five books matched to twenty-five genre-themed squares.

Here is my Halloween Bingo Card and the books I’m planning to read for it.

To match a book to every square, I need to read about three books a week. Not knowing which squares will be called in this first week of play, I’ve picked as my starting point three books from across the range of genres that Halloween Bingo covers.

For Dystopian Hellscape, I’m reading a brand new novella about a young man trying to survive on after the generations before him have made the planet to toxic to survive on.

For Noir, I’m reading an historical detective story set in Los Angeles in 1948. It was published in 1990 and is the oldest book on my Halloween Bingo reading list.

For Grave and Graveyard, I’m going all the way back to 2011 to the debut novel of one of my favourite comfort read authors.

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‘TOX’ by Harken Void  (2023)

‘TOX’ is a roll of the dice for me. I’ve never read anything by Harken Void before (I love that pseudonym – the author’s real name is Kevin). I picked up ‘TOX’ because I loved the boldness of the cover, the brevity of the title and the focus on young people having to clear up the mess they’ll inherit from my generation.

I’m hoping that this will be hard-edged but hopeful and generate some tension along the way.

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‘Devil In A Blue Dress’ by Walter Mosley (1990)

Walter Mosley is a new author for me. He probably shouldn’t be. He’s written more than fifty novels. He’s been around since 1990. Several of his books have been adapted for film and television including Devil in a Blue Dress (starring Denzel Washington, Don Cheadle and Jennifer Beals) and the HBO production of Always Outnumbered (starring Laurence Fishburne and Natalie Cole).

I only found out about him when I was searching for an American Noir book and was told that the fifteen Easy Rawlins, novels about a black amateur detective in LA, has reinvented the genre.

‘Devil In A Blue Dress’ is the first book in the series and was also Walter Moseley’s debut novel. I read the first two paragraphs and knew I’d struck gold. Here they are:

I was surprised to see a white man walk into Joppy’s bar. It’s not just that he was white but he wore an off-white linen suit and shirt with a Panama straw hat and bone shoes over flashing white silk socks. His skin was smooth and pale with just a few freckles. One lick of strawberry-blond hair escaped the band of his hat. He stopped in the doorway, filling it with his large frame, and surveyed the room with pale eyes; not a color I’d ever seen in a man’s eyes. When he looked at me I felt a thrill of fear, but that went away quickly because I was used to white people by 1948. I had spent five years with white men, and women, from Africa to Italy, through Paris, and into the Fatherland itself. I ate with them and slept with them, and I killed enough blue-eyed young men to know that they were just as afraid to die as I was.

Mosley, Walter. Devil in a Blue Dress (The Easy Rawlins Mysteries) (p.8). Profile. Kindle Edition

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‘First Grave On The Right ‘ by Darynda Jones (2011)

I picked ‘First Grave On The Right‘ because, being about the Grim Reaper, it’s a perfect fit for the Grave and Graveyard square and because I want to see what Darynda Jones’ debut novel was like.

I loved her most recent trilogy, ‘A Bad Day For Sunshine‘, ‘A Good Day For Chardonnay‘ and ‘A Hard Day For A Hangover‘ starring small-town sheriff Sunshine Vicram because the books combine humour, and engaging characters with some twisty crime plots. They also have a fair amount of sexual tension sliding towards romance and happy-ever-after land, but not enough to get in the way of the plot and not taken seriously enough to kill the humour in the books.

Her Betwixt & Between trilogy didn’t work as well for me because there was a lot more male eye candy, a stronger pull towards romance and a does-she-really-expect-me-to-take-this-seriously? magical element. Still, ‘Betwixt‘ and ‘Bewitched‘ made me smile and I keep promising myself that I’ll read ‘Beguiled‘ sometime soon.

I’m hoping that I’ll like Charley Davidson as much as I liked Sunshine Vicram and her daughter and that ‘First Grave On The Right‘ will open up a new series of comfort reads for me.