Tales of the Madman Underground was published in 2011 by the Penguin Group. This story is set in a really normal environment, and is extremely believable; nothing in it is something that couldn’t happen in real life. It’s also insane, and hilarious, and high school, when you combine all three with five jobs, insane numbers of cats and an actual group called the madman underground. The madman underground is a group of kids that for one reason or another, have ended up being sent to psychiatric counselling by their school, and gotten it on their permanent records, any time any teacher thinks they’re doing something strange they get sent back to counselling, so they spend most of every year in group counselling paid for by the school, with the psychiatrist changing every year. The group varies from the people who really need to be there, to the people who really don’t, from people who are insane, to people who pretend to be, to people who need the help but who can’t get it from the school for one reason or another.  The main character is named Karl Shoemaker and he definitely has problems, his father’s dead, his house is filled with a veritable swarm of cats, and his mother constantly steals his money to go boozing with her friends. He starts the year with a resolution to just “be normal” this year, in the process managing to offend some of his friends and proceeds to totter through the rest of the week with chapter titles like “How the Most Expensive Pizza of My Life Resulted in Delayed Gratzification”, “Eight Madmen, the Biggest Asshole in Ohio, and One Very Normal Guy”, “I was a Third Grade communist”, or “That, Son, was the lone Madman”, eventually, after much drama, confusion, hilarity, flash backs, suspicion and near revenge Karl Shoemaker eventually finds some resolution to his problems in getting a girlfriend, regaining estranged friends,  moving out of suspicion of being a potential serial killer, and finding a way to prevent his mom from stealing his money, and thus probably cutting her off from booze and her drinking buddies, who she mostly keeps by buying them drinks and who are probably a bad influence on her.

                 I would recommend this book to people who laugh and who can handle teenaged issues, if you don’t laugh at all then I would suggest seeing a psychiatrist or pursuing a career as a mob boss.