Three unemployed friends put off the real world by doing a lot of drugs and digging a lot of tunnels.

(from Tunneling to the Center of the Earth)

And if there’s any chance of being happier than that — filthy, cold and almost imperceptible from the ground we slept on — I would like to know how.

Ridiculous. Awesome, but gently, smoothly insane. There was so much left to think about with this story. It could have been ten times as long with all the material this plot has to offer but the author chose to keep things weirdly simplified, not exactly allegorical, but definitely not set in the real world. Am I suggesting this story should have been done differently, maybe exhausted its possibilities? No.
Here’s the author’s blog.