In this book Mantel, back on her home turf of fiction (this is her ninth novel), allows herself to gorge on simile and metaphor and wild comic invention -- the treats she had tried, and guiltily failed, to deny herself while following the hard-fact regimen of "Giving Up the Ghost."+ (At one point in the novel, Alison is put on a diet by stern Colette, and she suffers agonies.) "Beyond Black" feels like a great, gleeful binge, a wallow in the not-good-for-you riches of this writer's extraordinarily vivid, violent imagination.