The Yahoo Cage is 73,000-word a cautionary novel about our lot as human beings that seeks to shine light on the chains of our existence. It explores the unfairness of being born into the world innocent yet having to compete with concepts and institutions that have had centuries to learn to manipulate us. It contends with the beliefs that bigger diamonds mean greater love, that more money and fame will make us happier, and that physical perfection is beautiful and the epitome of truth. Excerpt:

The once slick and gleaming blood stain on Eddie’s black pants was dry now, but he still throttled around the turns as though we’d just torn out of the driveway. His broad, demonic grin was a perfect impression of Jack Nicolson busting through the bathroom door in The Shining. He cracked the window to exhaust the fumes of his Cuban cigar, sparse yellow hairs convulsing on his head like blades of wheat in a tornado. The glow of the dashboard lights illuminated his froglike face in a ghostly blue, and orange brimstone seethed at the tip of his cigar. 

It wasn’t so much his driving that caused me to question why I’d decided at a bar, drunk, at two in the morning to go on a “heist” with him, but rather the fact that since the “heist” he’d repeated a trio of songs on a continuous loop. He played these songs from a CD labeled “POST HEIST SONGS.” The songs were Steve Miller Band’s “Take the Money and Run,” Pink Floyd’s “Money,” and Britney Spears’s “Hit Me Baby One More Time.” He sang the first two songs, which clearly had contextual significance, with a lackluster enthusiasm, especially following the first two run-throughs, but when “Hit Me Baby One More Time” began its three-key, two-note keyboard intro, which sounded more and more like the shrill music in a horror movie with each playing, Eddie turned up the volume and belted the lyrics with the overenthusiasm of a drunken college girl on karaoke night.

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