I first discovered the brilliant but now all but forgotten novelist Barbara Comyns about 10 years ago when I came across an old Virago paperback of Our Spoons Came From Woolworths (1950), the story of 21-year-old Sophia and her husband Charles, struggling painters in bohemian 1930s London. Loosely based on Comyns's first, unhappy marriage, it's a story of poverty, unexpected (and often unwanted) babies, and a sad affair that tugs at your heartstrings despite its lack of sentimentality. As part of their acclaimed Modern Classics series, Virago have reintroduced Comyns to another generation by reprinting Spoons, along with another two of her 11 novels – Sisters By a River (1947) and The Vet's Daughter (1959).

There's a Dickensian feel to her work. The "tumbling up" Pockets in Great Expectations have nothing on the five siblings in Sisters (another semi-autobiographical story, this time based on Comyns's own ramshackle childhood), who live in an ancient house that smells of "walnuts and church", with their warring parents; a violent father and deaf, uninterested mother. Theirs is a macabre existence; they are the children who "squashed the rabbits" while trying to ride them; rats fall down the chimney into the porridge bubbling away on the stove; and bloated pig carcasses and even a "very dead boy" are found drifting in the river that flows past their house. 

However, Comyns's brilliant eye for the grotesque is nowhere more perfected than in The Vet's Daughter, a masterly example of suburban gothic meets magical realism. Set in the Clapham/Battersea borders at the turn of the century, the novel tells the strange, sad story of Alice Rowlands and her vicious father – he puts down his cancer-ridden wife like an animal, while selling the creatures brought to him for the same reason to the vivisectionist. There's a neurotic parrot locked in the lavatory, and a "partly cooked" cat. After a particularly traumatic episode in her young life Alice discovers she can levitate, a fact that, once discovered by her father, leads to a ghoulish, violent denouement on Clapham Common. 

Comyns's world is weird and wonderful. To call her a precursor to Angela Carter is to get as close as possible to an accurate literary comparison, but there's also something uniquely original about her voice. Tragic, comic and completely bonkers all in one, I'd go as far as to call her something of a neglected genius.