Born with a limp arm and the gnarled hands of a crone, Elva slinks away her childhood in the rickety Nova Scotia town of Demerett Bridge, captive in the shadow of her beautiful half-sister, Jane. But when love of Jane comes between Dom and Gil Barthélemy, twin brothers from down the way, it is Elva the watcher who unwittingly sets in motion a chain of murderous retribution.

Granted, few new twists are wrought plotwise in this debut novel by Stephens Gerard Malone. Many standbys of the CanLit backcountry macabre dutifully crop up: sibling rivalry, labour woes, religious fervour, racial tension, transgressive sex – all backdropped by forbidding landscape and blurred with fog from the none-too-distant sea. Nonetheless, it all works. About half the length of many novels of its sort, Miss Elva distills the panoramic small-town tragedy down to its narrative essence, and the result is a strange and strangely elegant little book whose tense momentum rarely wanes.

The spark is in the narrative voice. Filtered mostly through the wavery consciousness of the title character, Malone’s observations come delightfully slantwise, his prose neatly balancing the stylish and the folksy. And despite bordering on overly-familiar, the socially downcast half-Mi’kmaq Elva acts as an ideal observer, catching only frayed strands of detail, often misled in her struggles to untangle them. As Malone deftly puts it: “Elva mentally weaved a daisy chain of who here feels what about whom, unable to keep track of everyone’s secrets.”

Set in the summer of 1927, when Elva is 12, the long first section takes up the majority of the novel and packs the bulk of the dramatic punch. The brief second section, set in 1970 with Elva gaining renown as a Maud Lewis-like folk artist, fails to convince with its quick summation of painterly eccentricity. Luckily this epilogue detracts little from what came before, but it’s still a shame that this excellent debut’s only weak pages had to be the last ones.