Hilary Mantel’s fantasy about killing Thatcher is funny. Honest

Heaven knows what the millions of purchasers of the Man Booker-winning Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies will make of the ten stories collected here, for they return us to the landscape occupied by Hilary Mantel’s last great contemporary novel, Beyond Black (2005). This, for those of you unfamiliar with her pre- (or rather post-) Tudor work is a world of fraught domestic interiors, twitches on the satirical thread and, above all, stealing over the shimmering Home Counties gardens and the thronged Thames Valley shopping malls, a faint hint of the numinous.

Make that a very strong hint of the numinous, for The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher fairly crackles with evidence of the supernatural making its presence felt. ‘Sorry to Disturb’ finds the narrator emerging into the sitting room of her flat to find that the furniture has re-arranged itself. ‘How Shall I Know You?’, on the other hand, charts the adventures of a writer put up for the night by the literary society she is bidden to address in an almost phantasmal B&B. Thinking that she smells gas she consequently dreams of ‘members of the Book Group rolling from beneath my bed, sniggering as they plugged the chinks round the windows and doors with the torn pages of their manuscripts.’

All this, though, the merest bagatelle compared to ‘Terminus’, whose railway carriage-bound expositor is convinced that a train pulling out of Clapham Junction on the way to Waterloo harbours the ghost of her dead father. ‘The Heart Fails Without Warning’, meanwhile, is a desperately creepy account of an anorexic girl zealously starving herself to death while the rest of the family, including a plump and exasperated younger sister, looks on. On the final page, when ‘all traces of Morna have gone from the bedroom now’, Lola looks out of the window at night and sees her figure ‘standing and looking up at the house, bathed in a nimbus of frost’.