Whenever I finish a book by Hilary Mantel, I also close it with a deep sense of enjoyment. Her latest novel, Beyond Black, is no exception. Beyond Black, like much of Mantel's work is a dark comedy-humor combined with satire and social commentary.

Alison Hart, the main character of Beyond Black, is an overweight medium plying her trade along the M25, the highway that links the suburbs of London. Alison is a true psychic, her gift inherited from her mother, and Alison's everyday world is not like anyone else's. One of the book's interesting themes is the contrast between Alison's clients, many of who want to connect to the recently departed, and Alison herself, who wants desperately to be free of the ghosts that are haunting her.

To make contact with other world, Alison uses a "spirit guide" named Morris, a person from her past, whom she would prefer not to have contact with. Rather than a "dignified impassive medicine men or ancient Persian sages," she is stuck with a "grizzled grinning apparition in a book-maker's check jacket, and suede shoes with bald toe-caps."

At a psychic fair, Alison meets Colette, a woman, who while not in a terrible marriage, is in a mediocre one. Colette agrees to give up her suburban life to go on the road with Alison and become her assistant. Colette is, in many ways, the opposite of Alison. She is thin, organized, resourceful, and lacking in compassion. Her job is to restore order to Alison's life and business. Colette does not have "the gift," and so the world Alison describes to her remains alien even though the antics of the dead surrounding Alison begin to affect her.

In an attempt to make money, Colette decides Alison should publish a book, so she begins to tape interviews with Alison about her life and about being clairvoyant. Mantel uses these interviews as a device to slowly unfold the past Alison wishes to escape.

Alison inherited her psychic abilities from her mother, and as long as Alison can remember, she was haunted. When Alison was young, spirits would visit her during tests, grab her pencil, and scatter obscenities across her tests, resulting in her failing. Her homelike was no better. Ignored and abused as a child by her mother and her mother's associates, it turns out that those who tortured her when she was young haunt her in their afterlife. She longs to be rid of them. The dead, it turns out are not always trying to send messages of love and support, sometimes they just want to finish what they couldn't before they died. Alison longs to be rid of them.

When Colette suggests they buy a house in a new, suburban development, Alison agrees. Perhaps there, she will be safe from Morris and his friends. After all, the suburbs are supposedly the place where one can escape from life's problems. But, the suburb's promise is as empty for Alison as it is for so many others. Their neighbors, who believe Alison and Colette are lesbians, are not friendly. Alison initially feels safe in their new home because Morris cannot find a way in. It is built too well, lacking the loose floorboards and window and door cracks that made her old home so accessible. Eventually, however, Morris sets himself up in an outbuilding. When a homeless man befriended by Alison, is killed by one of the ghosts of her past, it is the last straw--not only for her, but also for Colette, who decides to return to her ex-husband.

Alison is left alone, and when circumstances provide her with the opportunity to get rid of her demons, she has to get it right.

Like all Mantels' books, Beyond Black requires the attention of the reader. Underneath the comic tone, are serious send-ups of many of the misplaced preoccupations of popular culture. As Mantel shows, humor and escapism can only cover-up so much. There is always some lurking demon that neither platitudes nor pop psychology can banish.