R.M. Vaughan, at the beginning of A Quilted Heart, advises: “Friends may read this fiction and come to believe the persons represented within are themselves, or perhaps other friends. They will be wrong.” This caveat, standard and reassuring, will surely come as a relief to the friends and the friends of friends of R. M. Vaughan, since the characters in this entertaining first novel are spectacularly rebarbative. It would be hard to get up in the morning and sing a cheery song if you harboured even a niggling suspicion that you might be the foundation on which Samson Brindle, Sylvain Oulette, or Marsh Cole were built.

Quilted Heart is both short and loopy enough to have been a child of the three-day novel competition. For all its brevity, however, it is chock-a-block with event. In the late autumn of 1971, a year after the imposition of the War Measures Act, the migraine-prone Inspector Foulard is called to pry the body of Marsh Cole from the empty swimming pool at Brindle House – a sagging and imposing edifice in Magog, Quebec. Cole is frozen, in a posture of attempted escape, to the pool’s crusty margins. He has died of dehydration. In Cole’s diary, Foulard reads a tale of passion, artistry, jealousy, manipulation, deceit, and murder. It’s the story of a bizarre gay love triangle involving Samson, the degenerate anglo aristocrat; Sylvain, the gifted and neurotic Québécois he murders; and Marsh, the dried-out diarist, who wants to own them both in one way or another, but who winds up ricocheting between the primal pair like a prized marble.

You can read The Quilted Heart as an allegory of national dysfunction: the crumbling house in which live impossibly divergent, warring sensibilities that are impervious to mediation; tenants who, generation after generation, are bent on sending one another poison pen letters. You could even read it as a parable of resurgent art and dunning commerce. But perhaps it’s one of those books that is at its best on the surface. It’s a deliciously camp and gothic pot boiler, the kind of horrible tale Edward Gorey might hanker after illustrating. A provocative and energetic miniature, it’s the work of a writer who has a poet’s gift for lifting the veil on an arresting image – a leopard head, a beaten dog, a fiery eruption – in such a way that the reader is often surprised, sometimes breathless. Taken at bedtime, R. M. Vaughan’s first novel will fuel either dreams or nightmares, depending on how blameless or guilted your heart.