“There should be a word for that brief period just after waking when the mind is full of warm pink nothing. You lie there entirely empty of thought, except for a growing suspicion that heading towards you, like a sockful of damp sand in a nocturnal alleyway, are all the recollections you’d really rather do without, and which amount to the fact that the only mitigating factor in your horrible future is the certainty that it will be quite short.”

Today’s post is brief, as I’m heading out for the weekend, but I wanted to keep adding to my Halloween list of capsule reviews. I’ve been doing short reviews of some pretty heavy and disturbing horror fiction this month, and I thought I’d lighten things up and add the great Terry Pratchett to this reader’s guide to Halloween. There are a great many places you can start with the wonderful Discworld series, but Mort is as good as any of them. The fourth in the saga, published in 1987, this is the first in his ‘Death’ sequence. Mort is Death’s apprentice and he’s pretty unsuited for the job. He falls in love with death’s daughter, believe it or not, which leads to plenty of magic, slapstick and other hijinks as always in Ank-Morpork. If you like this kind of humor, it doesn’t get much better than Pratchett, and this book will give you lots of laughs, which we can all use right about now.