Halloween Bingo is a reading game that a group of friends started to play a few years ago on a bookish platform that has since gone to seed (or as good as). The game starts on 1st September (unless our game moderators shake things up…as they are wont to do) and runs until 31st October.
During the game, each player has a bingo card to fill in, where each square requires a different book to be read. The book has to fit the square.
I’ll not replicate the whole of the instructions, explanations and categories here. I’ll only use this page as my personal space to record bingo reading updates.

Markers:
Mrs. Hudson will mark the squares that I have read. As in previous years, The Gang will mark squares that have been called.

Updated Card:

Special Spell Cards:
I have the following cards available:
Amplification Spell: 1
Transfiguration Spell: 1
Bingo Flip: 0 – (I Bingo Flipped my Cozy Mystery square for Heart’s Doomsday square.)
Author Wild Card: 1/2 – (My author Wild Card this year will be Cyril Hare.)

Row # 1
Diverse Voices – John Crow’s Devil (Marlon James) – Rating: 3.5*
Country House Mystery – The Stately Home Murder (Catherine Aird) – Rating: 3.5*
Truly Terrifying – Bad Girls: A History of Rebels and Renegades (Caitlin Davies) – Rating: 4*
Sleepy Hollow – Tragedy at Law (Cyril Hare – Author Wild Card) – Rating: 4*
Psych – Ripley Under Ground (Patricia Highsmith) – Rating: 3.5*

Row # 2
Gothic – Benighted (J.B. Priestley) – Rating: 5*Cozy Mystery Doomsday – Ragnarok (A.S. Byatt) – Rating: 3.5*
Dark Academia – Laurels are Poison (Gladys Mitchell) – Rating: 3*
Halloween – Hallowe’en Party (Agatha Christie) – Rating: 4*
Terror in a Small Town – The Religious Body (Catherine Aird) – Rating: 4*

Row # 3
Relics and Curiosities – The Picture of DOrian Gray (Oscar Wilde) – Rating: 3*
Murder Most Foul – The Mysterious Affair at Styles (Agatha Christie) – Rating: (currently reading)
“Poe” the Raven – Lord Peter Views the Body (Dorothy L. Sayers)
Southern Gothic – Serena (Ron Rash) – Rating: 2.5*
In the Dark, Dark Woods – Death Walks the Woods (Cyril Hare) – Rating: 3*

Row # 4
Black Cat – Black As He’s Painted (Ngaio Marsh) – Rating: 3*
Grave or Graveyard – The Hollow Man (John Dickson Carr) – Rating: 2*
Classic Noir – The Blank Wall (Elizabeth Sanxay Holding) – Rating: 4*
Read by Flashlight or Candle light – Strong Poison (Dorothy L. Sayers) – Rating: 5*
Film at 11 – Rebecca (Daphne Du Maurier) – Rating: 5*

Row # 5
Amateur Sleuth – The Thirteen Problems (Agatha Christie) – Rating: 3.5*
It was a Dark and Stormy Night – Macbeth (Jo Nesbo) – Rating: 1*
Trick or Treat – Death in Fancy Dress (Anthony Gilbert) – Rating: 4*
International Woman of Mystery – Beast in View (Margaret Millar) – Rating: 4*
Classic Horror – The Bloody Chamber (Angela Carter) – Rating: 3.5*
Many thanks to Christine, Obsidian, and official bingo ambassador Char for all of the work that you have put into this!
It’s yet again been such a blast to play and to see others have just as much fun playing.
Happy Halloween!
You are off to a great start. I’m so excited to see Halloween Bingo! You’ve got everything planned out and ready to go. I wish I could play this year but I’m so far behind on life (that derecho just pushed my plans months behind). I would have liked to see it on BookLikes but hey, I have tried to get on there and it just gets so frustrating. I’m hoping one day, I ‘ll try and by some higher force, it will be work and be wonderful (a girl can dream, right?)
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Hi. Thank you. I hope you are well. I really share your wish that BL would come back to life but… I’ve not even been able to log in for over a week now.
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Looks good. And the bingo card is cool looking as well.
Given how slow I am, I might try to go just for a single row. Do you have a link to the page where the card originally was?
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I will pm you on GR.
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Thank you!
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Oh, the anticipation! I will try to sit down this weekend to fill my own card. Looking forward to this Bingo a lot!
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I’m really looking forward to it, too. 😀
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Fabulous!
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I’m excited! I really am looking forward to this. I fear the sheep anecdotes will come to an end. It doesn’t really work with the new format.
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Aww. I’m sorry about losing the Gang … but I understand. 😦 Anyway, your card and setup looks great, and those are some exciting books you’ve picked!
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Thank you. Finding books to fit the squares and seeing what books others pick is such a big part of what makes this game so much fun.
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It is! I usually spend a whole weekend on nothing but choosing my Halloween Bingo reads. Lately it’s become a repeated case of “oh, right — I’d totally forgotten I even own this book!” 🙂
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LoL. I’ve been spacing this out. I’m still looking for a few books, but I also want to leave a few squares blank for now and read books that I haven’t allocated – just to see if I can fit them in.
But there are some books I am definitely going to read and that I am really looking forward to.
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I usually do it by squares — there are squares when I know I have plenty of options, and where I may have a longlist (sometimes, a really, really long longlist 😀 ), but where I won’t even try to pin it down to a single book (nor two or three, for that matter); and then, there are squares where I know if I don’t think about them beforehand, I’ll spend so much time trying to find something that fits AND that I’m in the mood for, it’ll just impinge on my enjoyment of the game. And then, there are the (rare) books that I know I want to read, but that will only fit one particular square (or very, very few squares) on my card, so I’ll need to make sure I’ll be reading them for that / those squares to be able to fit them in … (ah, decisions, decisions! 🙂 )
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LoL. Exactly. I tried to allocate the “difficult” ones first. I’m still looking for “Graveyard”, tho… (My fall-back for this is Murder at the Vicarage).
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Have you read Carr’s “The Hollow Man”? Its alternative (= American) title is “The Three Coffins”; and the book’s singular most crucial scene is set in a grave site. (Not an official graveyard, but the three graves — and the three coffins and what / whom they contain — are the book’s key element.) I think MR and OB have both read it; it might be worthwhile asking them whether it qualifies.
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Perfect! Thank you! It is one of the book I will read anyway as it’s one of the two that “won” the poll!
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You’re welcome. I hope you’re going to enjoy it!
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Hmmm…. I have Murder at the Vicarage and a strange reluctance to not read Ray Bradbury’s A Graveyard of Lunatics. Hmmm…
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My copy of Murder at the Vicarage is the edition that has the headstone on the cover. Otherwise, no luck with any grave or graveyard in the story.
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Ah — I’ll have to check the cover on my copy then. I might be stuck with Bradbury. 😉
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So, you’re looking for that square, too? I have asked OB and MR about The Hollow Man. What other potentials have you got?
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Pretty much, that’s it, unless I’m ready to troll the covers of all the books I’ve already read. I’d love to read The Hollow Man, but I really want a vintage copy of it and I’ve been stubborn about it.
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Well, I can think of a couple of Val McDermid titles that would work but I have a feeling that they are not up your alley.
If you’re looking for a short work to get the square over with, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Body-Snatcher will work.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/561635.The_Body_Snatcher?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=e6dhZxcz24&rank=1
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Oh, thanks for that recommendation – I’ll keep it up my sleeve. 🙂
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Well, it’s from but short.
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Typing on the kindle is useless. I meant grim but short.
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hehe – I figuredi it was something like that. 🙂
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Also, it looks like coffins will work for the square, too. OB and Christine added a clarification on the Will This Fit thread.
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What books are you looking forward to most?
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Oh — so many. Joy Ellis, my “minority authors reads, the Sharyn McCrumb I’ve penciled in for “Southern Gothic” (she’s really becoming my go-to author for that square), Michael Connelly, Ann Cleeves, Harkup’s “Death by Shakespeare”, T.S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book” (can’t read that one often enough), Christianna Brand’s “Fog of Doubt”.
The one I’m most curious about, though, is J.J. Connington’s “Nordenholt’s Millions” — a scientifc dystopia written by a Golden Age mystery writer who was a chemist by training, and which sounds eerily prescient for our day and age. I’ve been sitting on it ever since I ordered it in spring; couldn’t get myself to read it while the pandemic was first “flourishing”, but it sounds like the perfect book for my “Dystopian Hellspace” square. (It’s also pretty much the only reason why I haven’t used a spell card on that square … yet.)
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The Connington books sounds fabulous!
And of course, I will watch out to see what you’re making of Death by Shakespeare. I will keep it for after the Bingo. 🙂
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It sounded too perfect to be true not to be used for the nonfiction square (“Truly Terrifying”)! 🙂 (Though at a pinch, given the cover, I might also move it to “Paint it Black” …)
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It definitely has a black cover. 😀 My non-fiction pick also is one of the ones I really look forward to. It’s about Holloway and is written by the daughter of Margaret Forster, whose biography of Daphne du Maurier is also sitting my shelf and also would have fitted the square (I think).
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Oooh, I’d been wondering about that one!
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Incidentally, if I do end up using my Transfiguration Spell, currently my inclination is for “Trick or Treat” (the one square I’m a bit bummed not to have) … and “Death in a Fancy Dress”.
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When I typed in Death in Fancy Dress into GR, it came up with the Farjeon book by the same title that I read last year and I may have slapped my forehead as that was another book I didn’t even think about. I just didn’t think I had many books that would fit but apparently there are more than I initially realised.
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How was the Farjeon?
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It was ok, but not one of the better Farjeons. Funny in places, I think he tried to be quite light, but also quite convoluted.
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Uh. oh. Sigh. OK then …
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Yeah, I wouldn’t recommend it. But it would have been an option…without rushing out to buy one (fadedpage has it).
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Well, that’s good to know in any event. No dice on the Bredon fountain splash, though, I take it!
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Oh, goodness no.
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Thought not. 😀
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It’s hard to compete with Death Bredon.
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Hah. True. As even his cousin found in this particular instance …
Btw, Death Bredon also features in what, upon revisiting, I’ve confirmed to be my favorite Wimsey short story (contained in “Lord Peter Views the Body”) — the wine tasting one.
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LoL. I still haven’t made it to the short stories. I just really don’t want to run out new Wimsey’s I guess.
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Well, you’ll have every reason to look forward to this one then. 😀 (The whole collection, as a matter of fact.)
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On a completely unrelated note, I finished John Julius Norwich’s Shakespeare’s Kings yesterday, and since he left out King John, I was wondering if I want to follow up with Starkey’s Magna Carta. Have you crossed paths with Starkey? I have the book, tho don’t know why as I tend to avoid his tv programs. Well, not avoid…but I tend to find other things to do.
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I’d say get Dan Jones’s book on the Magna Carta first — then see if there are any questions or issues you still find unaddressed …
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Ah, ok. I might de-shelf the Starkey then. I’m not desperate to read about the subject in particular, I just happen to have the book on my 2020 Mt. TBR shelf.
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No worries, I figured as much … But I really do recommend Jones. I love his writing — and his take on Plantagenet / Medieval history.
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Noted. 😀
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