Stephen Ausherman’s Typical Pigs could easily be grouped, based on its synopsis, for a contemporary rip-off of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Indeed, much of the conflict in the book centers around a home for mentally handicapped adults. But the narrator of this darkly poignant and at times even deliciously wicked novel is not McMurphy the con-man but Kenneth Godwin, an employee at the home who may belong better in treatment. Likable even as he is incredibly twisted, Godwin spends his time playing “Barabbas.” This is a game which involves taking the worst of situation and exacerbating it, even against his interests and certainly against his better nature. When this quasi-Iago recruits his friend Hank and another employee to join his twisted game among the patients, the book enters a field that is both horrible to contemplate and impossible to avert one’s gaze from. New Mexico works itself into Ausherman’s narrative as a place of cottonwood and oil, of sunlight that never ends and of volcanoes smoldering patiently in hibernation. The land has “a foreign feel to it, in the sense that locals make you feel welcome to stay no longer than two weeks.” Yet one wants to stay in Ausherman’s world, even as it devolves, for the characters are as beautiful and provocative in their flaws as the landscape is stunning in its bare-bones architecture. We may hate Kenneth at some points, but we never want to abandon his narrative, and his emotional rebellion, his willingness to stretch the boundaries of his own malice, is invigorating even as, in relation to the other characters, it becomes achingly tragic.