Early in Dying for Veronica, Matthew Remski’s more-gothic-than-Catholic, guilt-ridden first novel, the author writes: “The room filled with the light you see when the purple curtains of your confessional cleave open like the dress of a whore mounting the steps of a gallows.” It’s an unwieldy image, but for all the force and apparent seriousness, it is an apt description of the sublime sensibility on which this novel depends.

And so, Remski has issued a challenge: a novel that pursues a story through a series of portentous, ludicrous pronouncements. For the most part, Dying for Veronica does away with the restraints of plot, offering in its place a man remembering his unholy love for his sister. The setting is a Catholic church and the story (such as it is) unfolds as a kind of passion play that both condemns the narrator to his nostalgic, repugnant lust and redeems him from it.

What actually happens to Veronica, an elusive saint/whore/virgin archetype is difficult to tell. Molested by her father (Our Father, in the novel), a drunken lout who received free room and a small salary as caretaker of the church, she learns to give her body like a sacrament, even to her brother. Eventually, she finds redemption in a convent, becoming the Sister her now-adult brother – the organist at the cathedral, plunking the keys and mooning for his irreverent childhood – can never have.

The question at the heart of Dying for Veronica, though, isn’t so much, “What happens to Veronica?” as, “What happens to personal history?” In searching for truth in the past, Remski seeks the gloriously religious. Dying for Veronica is more ritual than substance, and while the prose is at times overwrought, Remski still manages to convey what it once must have been like to believe.