Its scares are more deliberate, and its fantastical elements are more fairy tale: the little black velvet rucksacks that help the children fly, for example. Giant makes a less specific raid on British folklore and history, and its prose is less sparse, more atmospheric. In each one, the enemy force is confronted in the ruins of slum clearance. Like Elidor, Giant has two boys and a girl protecting treasure from eerie, otherworldly soldiers – the bizarre and frightening side-by-side with the mundane (which always works for me). Garner gets a brief mention, and Gordon says he hadn’t read him before he wrote Giant, but the style, the aim, the world of each writer is very close to the other’s. He’s quite gracious, recognising James as an influence but not a conscious one. There’s a good interview with Gordon on the MR James fansite, Ghosts and Scholars. Gordon’s characters have the kind of naturalistic awkardness familiar from Alan Garner’s Owl Service or Elidor, where more is said with body language or an exclamation – and though it feels a bit worthy and ’15-Up’, it suits these stories of the supernatural to have things spelled out as little as possible. Even the scenes in Jonk’s home or the town museum have that slightly coddled, constricted atmosphere of being nudged slightly out of the routine.

Beginning in the last days of the school term before the Christmas holidays, there isn’t a page that isn’t dizzying with mist, brutally whirling with snow, dark as dark gets, or slippy underfoot with midnight frost.

I always remembered The Giant Under the Snow as a ‘juvenile fantasy’, a few creepy set pieces dropped here and there into a standard runaround – and maybe it could have done with more unusual third act – but I was surprised at how subtle it was, how suspenseful, and how incredibly atmospheric.

The Giant Under the Snow by John Gordon