Lazy Fascist Press, 188 pages, paperback, $12.95

Noah Cicero’s Go to work and do your job. Care for your children. Pay your bills. Obey the law. Buy products. might just have one of the best titles you’ve ever read, not to mention one of the longest. The book also boasts one of my favorite covers of 2013 by the current king of cover art, Matthew Revert, and was published by Lazy Fascist Press, which is at the forefront of the group of indie presses that are ushering in the Golden Age of independent publishing.

Yeah, there’s a lot to like about this novel before even cracking it open. However, Cicero manages to deliver a narrative so packed with social critique, humor, and weirdness that anything not directly pertaining to the story is quickly forgotten.

Michael Scipio is yet another victim of the post-graduate limbo. He wants to be a responsible adult who contributes to society and leads the kind of life those who go to college are supposed to lead. Unfortunately, he’s buried in student loans, and the job market is undergoing a crisis that reflects the weakened state of the economy. With no options in sight, Mike accepts a job at NEOTAP, a government-run prison. The pay is acceptable and he gets health insurance, so he wants to do his best to keep the job.

However, weird things are happening at NEOTAP. For starters, employees are constantly watched and treated no better than the prisoners. There’s also a rule about not asking questions, and that one’s hard to comply with when prisoners and employees start disappearing from NEOTAP and their identities and records vanish from all databases. Mike gets no answers to the questions he’s not supposed to ask, so he joins forces with Monica Whitten, a fellow NEOTAP employee, to try to discover the truth behind NEOTAP and the missing people. Mike and Monica get to know each other as they uncover the secrets behind the disappearances and the violent uprising about to take place, but what their curiosity unveils and the things they will have to do to fight it are weirder and far more dangerous than they could have ever imagined.

Go to work and do your job. Care for your children. Pay your bills. Obey the law. Buy products. Besides being the title of the book, those are also the Five Pillars of Modern Society. With them, along with a plethora of other elements, Cicero eviscerates modern life and exposes some of its most pointless/senseless practices. While the narrative takes place in a very near future and the humor keeps readers from succumbing to depression, it’s easy to imagine life as described by the author, and that infuses the narrative with an unexpected but strong sense of urgency and poignancy.

Cicero’s deconstruction of modern life in a First World country is almost academic, but he hides it in a bizarre story with an unexpected and wacky ending (I’m still trying to figure out what the bible was doing in there). The prose is simple and straightforward, and that gives the book an enjoyable pacing. However, the best thing about this novel are the depression-inducing passages that read like the sad stories from friends we’ve all heard (and sometimes told ourselves):

“It occurred to me that I went to college and learned about Rousseau and the structure of the Chinese government and constitutional law, got good grades and never once had to learn about urine tests. I was not educated to give urine tests. I started to think that my education was pointless. Instead of learning about the geography of Iran or the history of Russia, I should have been learning the science of urine tests. The science of watching urine leaving another man’s penis. I owed $25,000 in student loans so that I could monitor urine tests.”

Books are the best thing you can buy, so forget the other Pillars of Modern Society and buy this.

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Gabino Iglesias is writer, journalist, and book reviewer living in Austin, TX. He’s the author of Gutmouth and a few other things no one will ever read. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.