Wounds appall and fascinate Caroline Blackwood: her imagination can hardly tear itself away from them. Confronted with life's damage, she seems like the woman in one of her stories who—after a bungled operation—cannot close her eyes and is afraid to weep in case of dangerous inflammation. With unsparing lucidity, her books pore over maimings, physical and psychological. An early essay, 'Burns Unit', itemises hideous injuries—breasts like 'giant vermilion blisters', bodies 'the colour of blackened bacon'—then goes on to assess reactions to these horrors. The useless anguish of the patients' relatives is set against the emotionless efficiency of the medical staff. To the latter, precision is 'incomparably superior to compassion'; 'even the coldest and most impersonal curative action' is 'less inhuman than sentimental and empathising inaction'. It is just such valuably unfeeling responses that Caroline Blackwood imitates as a writer. Swabbing her emotions with the antiseptics of logic, she opts for the precise and impersonally curative. Detachment is worn like a surgical mask. Though her novels all argue for compassion and involvement, they operate through unflinching probings into physical and emotional damage.

Like the cameras monitoring danger-list cases in 'Burns Unit', Caroline Blackwood's fictions regularly focus on wounded children. In her novels, they are always under threat, frighteningly vulnerable to the ravages of time, accident and other human beings. Bitterly smarting from the hurt of a broken relationship, the woman who narrates The Stepdaughter is shamingly made to see how her partner's neglected child has been far more badly mauled by life. Exploring the fusty recesses of an Ulster Protestantfamily, Great Granny Webster brings to light spectacular instances of warping by early influence. Like The Stepdaughter, too, it seethes with emotional disturbance. Under the taut prose—pegged down by sharp factual detail—lunacy, neurosis and suicidal melancholia strain furiously. Despite this nervous intensity, both books—controlled accounts of hysteria—are often hysterically funny.

Her new novel, The Fate of Mary Rose, is very much in this tradition, though adding some ingredients her previous fiction has been short on—a good plot and fast narrative pace. At its centre is an ugly murder: six-year-old Maureen Sutton is abducted, sexually assaulted, killed. This extreme instance of a child's vulnerability is used to set in motion a more complex demonstration of the same idea. What the book aims to show is that there are more ways of destroying a child than homicidal assault. Like the Alsatians hunting for the killer, nemesis is finally unleashed at smug parental irresponsibility.

The book makes much use of adroit counterpoint. Its febrile story is narrated by a man who is emotionally tepid. A self-centred historian, he is taught—hilariously and harrowingly—the importance of other people's pasts. When the story opens, Rowan—early thirties, elegant, single-mindedly careerist—is complacently ensconced in a double life. In London, there is Gloria, whom he doesn't want to marry, but enjoys spending time with; in Beckham, there is Cressida, whom he doesn't enjoy spending time with, but has married—because she was pregnant with his child, Mary Rose, now six years old like the murdered girl. Beckham is a show-piece village: bees drone reassuringly in the wistaria; the tock of cricket balls sounds across the green. Reputable folk with decent incomes prosper decorously behind the period façades. Under her oak beams, dotingly maternal Cressida launders Mary Rose's clothes by hand, plies her with health food and wholesome sentiments.

Maureen's murder bespatters this idyll. Everywhere, niceness is shattered as—magnet-like—the presence of the sexual maniac draws psychosis, disturbance, hysteria to the surface. Horror-comic happenings, escalating frantically, propel the book through weird turnings to a grim ending.

Picking over perverse attitudes to childhood, the novel nods sarcastically towards James Barrie. Beckham is a 'never-never land'; an injured child resembles Wendy shot down by the Lost Boys. Mary Rose is linked ironically with her fictional namesake—not carried off from the real world by fairies, but taken over by the demons of psychiatric breakdown. Images from necromancy keep materialising in this book: appropriately, since it deals with the way people can be hag-ridden by childhood trauma.

Cressida, for instance, boiling cauldrons of black dye, becomes more and more witch-like. She also becomes—as her behaviour skids increasingly out of control—more and more appallingly funny. As her black obsessions swell up to crescendo so does the book's comedy. The novel's final sections are almost unbearably hilarious: again, because of counterpoint. In a last desperate effort to keep uninvolved, Rowan dispatches his secretary, beige-clad, temperate Fay Wisherton, to stay with the now feverishly funereal Cressida, unstoppably voluble, behind her black veil, on the subject of sexual atrocity. At times, as you laugh, you reflect a little uneasily on one of the book's lines, a reference to 'the beautiful finesse that mitigates the cruelty of the bullfighter'. But this is never just sadistic entertainment. The aghast guffaws the book provokes are safety-valve laughs relieving a remorselessly built-up pressure. Ferociously moral behind its harsh jokes, The Fate of Mary Rose gives new life to the cliché, 'agonisingly funny'.