Bag of Bones is a classic Stephen King story in many ways, taking the first hundred pages or so to establish its setting in New England, this time in upstate Maine in an area so remote it doesn’t actually have a name. The story revolves around a widowed writer who owns a lakeside house called by the bizarre name of Sara Laughs, and which is haunted by the ghost of the eponymous Sara, a black musician who lived there at the start of the 20th century. Since the murder of her child Kito, other children born in the area have also died mysteriously, and all of them had similar names.

In ‘South Park’, Kenny, a child with a K- name which occurs in BoB, not too different to ‘Kito’ and also to ‘Kyra’, the child at the centre of the present-day plot of Bag of Bones, is killed in repeated episodes. By establishing that this is not the same child but different children with the same name, each one echoing the previous one and fated to suffer a similar premature death, the apparent impossibility of Kenny’s serial deaths is explained.

A strange aside is provided by the construction of a park called South Park in London SW6, in 1907; while it was being built, a mysterious skeleton was discovered. It seems the area of nearby Hurlingham Park is a former plague pit, and Neolithic remains have been found there too. (This is beginning to sound a bit Quatermass-ish if you ask me).