Meet Mike. Mike wants to be a responsible human, but he's buried in student loans and job prospects are bleak in the down economy. What he needs is a well-paying job that provides health care. This is what leads Mike to accepting a job at NEOTAP, a government-run prison.

But NEOTAP is unlike any other prison. NEOTAP is a place where the employees are treated no better than the prisoners. Where your personal conversations are monitored. Wait, do you feel that? That's not the ever-loving presence of God you feel. It's NEOTAP, watching you right now. Worst of all, employees and prisoners alike are disappearing from NEOTAP. People who show up for work one day might be gone the next, their existence erased from all NEOTAP records.

After becoming aware of the string of disappearances, Mike and Monica Whitten, a fellow NEOTAP employee, team up to discover the truth behind NEOTAP. But before Mike and Monica discover the violent uprising on the horizon, they will drink pumpkin spice lattes from Starbucks, they will watch movies on Netflix, they will form a meaningful relationship in hopes of one day achieving the five pillars of a happy life.

Repeat after me:

Go to work and do your job. Care for your children. Pay your bills. Obey the law. Buy products.

Vasily Krymov is a first-generation Russian immigrant living in Youngstown, Ohio. He drinks coffee at the Waffle House. He drinks rum in seedy strip clubs. He washes dishes at a steakhouse for minimum wage. Through all of it, he thinks of suicide, envisioning grand escapes from his own personal hell.

When he discovers a pill bottle full of Oxycontin in the restroom of a bar, Vasily thinks he has found his escape. He and his best friend devise a plant to sell the pills to raise enough money to head out west and escape the squalid streets of Youngstown forever. But for a man like Vasily, escaping one hell only means finding another.

A bleak, comedic masterpiece of down-and-outers in decaying America, "The Insurgent" is Noah Cicero at his minimalistic best. "The Collected Works of Noah Cicero Vol. 2" also features three of Noah Cicero's most acclaimed short stories: "Two Old Lovers Bring Out Their Guns," "Visiting My Sister," and "Two Hard Workers."

The supreme introduction to the neurosis of Noah Cicero, "The Collected Works of Noah Cicero Vol. I" contains the early masterpieces by the greatest minimalist writer ever to hail from Youngstown, Ohio. Collecting Noah Cicero's most acclaimed and popular works, this volume includes the short novels "The Human War" (soon to be a major motion picture), "The Doomed," "The Condemned," and "Burning Babies," along with rare novellas and short stories that have not been available to the public in years. Stark in their beauty, raw in their sadness, and driven by a desperate compulsion to save - and be saved by - humanity, "The Collected Works of Noah Cicero Vol. I" highlights what it is to be young and poor in America. Buy this book and learn why freedom is good. Buy this book and become beautiful. Buy this book and know that the distance between you and happiness is the distance between you and the nearest Denny's. So get in the car and drive.