The cult of Travis Jeppesen.

The world of Travis Jeppesen's first novel Victims is one of abandoned people. Full of orphans, drifters, losers and fuck-ups, it could be described as Beckettian if Beckett could be distilled, pack-frozen and flavored by Harmony Korine-concentrate. Some of the characters join cults; others amuse themselves by sticking telescopes up octogenarian women's vaginas; one writes an endless novel nobody will ever read; another watches cows and dribbles; one lies in a ditch staring at the sky.

The plot, if you want one, is straightforward. A teenage white-trash girl named Tanya gets pregnant and the father-to-be hangs himself. Tanya then goes off and joins the Overcomers, a religious sect so named because of their conviction that our earthly "vehicles" and beliefs must be overcome before we ascend to merge with divine extra-terrestrials. In their Waco-like compound, she gives birth to a son, Herbert. It's not his subsequent sexual relations with his mother that get Herbert kicked out of the commune, but rather his predilection for the sacred goat, whose innards he eats raw. Herbert leaves and settles near a town called Monkhole, where he tends cows. The cult does a Heaven's Gate number and goes up in flames. That's about it.

What makes Victims interesting is the use of a degraded milieu to orchestrate a set of metaphysical speculations. Herbert's life is described as "a progression through oblatory"?sacrificial?"stages." His devouring of the goat is depicted as a Bataillean act of consumption. Watching over the semi-comatose cows, he veers between becoming god-like and cow-like as he chews on the same leaves as his charges. "A reluctant god," is how Jeppesen glosses this in-between state. The trope of the idiot-savant runs through the novel: Herbert is "a free mind, free sensibility. Always open to the more precarious forms of knowledge." His friend Howard envies the retarded: "Perhaps if he succeeds in joining them, he will finally be able to know something." Howard's opus is called Victimology?more tract than novel, a meditation on how the victim-aggressor relationship is the primary link between men.

Jeppesen is a versatile writer, and Victims traipses through a variety of styles. In its less good moments this can become cloying. One chapter is so derivative of Beckett's Watt that it belongs more in a creative writing class than in a published novel (it would, admittedly, receive an "A" for imitative accuracy); other passages regurgitate Burroughs ("Memories of nighttime rides through empty towns thoughts blurred by hashish headaches").

These lapses are rare, though. On the whole the book holds a remarkably confident and able line through complicated waters, diving into interiority, surfacing in direct speech, aquaplaning into prose that's brilliant at times?nowhere more so than when a cloud eclipses the sun above Herbert's field and Jeppesen, narrator of endless, aimless watching, writes: "God drops the remote control on the hardwood floor; batteries pop out; world goes on."