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Hilary Mantel's reputation now rests so heavily on Thomas Cromwell that it is easy to forget she spent decades writing strange, corrosive novels about modern England - and Beyond Black, published in 2005 and shortlisted for the Orange Prize, may be the strangest and most corrosive of them all. It is a ghost story, a black comedy, and a study of trauma wearing the costume of a suburban satire, and it remains one of the most unsettling things Mantel ever wrote - by her own admission, more horrid than anything she could have imagined writing.

The premise is deceptively simple. Alison Hart is a medium who, with her assistant Colette, takes her one-woman psychic show around the Home Counties, offering her audiences a point of contact between this world and the next. On the surface she is a happy-go-lucky woman, but the persona is a mask worn for her public. The crucial conceit - and the source of the book's horror - is that Alison's gift is real. Her psychic ability is never questioned, and neither is that of the other sensitives on the circuit. The dead are everywhere in this novel, and they are not wise or consoling. They are petty, vicious, and confused. Worst among them are the Fiends, the spirits of cruel men from Alison's childhood, led by Morris, her repulsive spirit guide, who shuffles invisibly through her dressing rooms and her home. As the novel unspools Alison's early life in the slums of Aldershot - a childhood of squalor, exploitation, and abuse that makes the Dickensian comparison feel inadequate - the hauntings reveal themselves as something closer to flashback than visitation. The book's central thesis is that pain cannot be abandoned or hidden, only mitigated through direct confrontation.

What makes the novel bearable, and frequently exhilarating, is the comedy. This is dark material delivered with genuine wit - satire, black comedy, slapstick even - and the humour does not soften the horror so much as illuminate it from an unexpected angle. The psychic-fair subculture is rendered with merciless precision: the rivalries, the tat, the punters who want their dead flattered rather than described. So is the setting, which is its own achievement. Alison and Colette buy a new-build house in a half-finished development, and Mantel turns the edgelands around the M25 - dull towns, samey venues, soulless hotels, A roads past industrial estates and the sprawl of Heathrow - into a grey nowhere on the edge of somewhere, a landscape as liminal as Alison herself. The prose throughout is a pleasure of a peculiar kind; this is writing you stop to reread, sentences so exact they sting.

The book has real flaws, and they are worth naming honestly. Plot is not one of Mantel's priorities here. There is not much in the way of story; the novel circles and accumulates rather than advances, and for long stretches it can feel like brilliant scene-setting in search of forward motion. Some readers find it bleak and slow, with unlikeable characters and dialogue that fails to pull them in - and Colette in particular is a hard companion, a woman of such pinched, joyless pragmatism that spending four hundred pages in her company is an endurance test, however sharply she is drawn. The pacing sags in the middle third, and the resolution, when it arrives, is quieter than the long darkness preceding it might lead you to expect. This is also, unavoidably, a difficult book at the level of content: the childhood material involves sustained sexual abuse and violence, and Mantel does not look away.

But these objections, fair as they are, mistake the kind of novel this is. Beyond Black is not a thriller about ghosts; it is a novel about what survival actually costs, written by someone who understood that the past is not behind us but underfoot, hanging around the kitchen, putting its feet on the furniture. The famous line about Mantel's humour - that it goes so far beyond black it becomes a kind of light - is exactly right. Few novels manage to be this funny and this frightening at once, and fewer still earn their hauntings so completely. If you came to Mantel through Wolf Hall and want to know what else she could do, this is the place to find out - just don't expect to be comforted.