Wild Animus

Travel back in time with me, dear readers, to the end of the spring semester of my senior year of undergrad. It's early May, because the soot-encrusted ugly snowbanks are mostly, but not quite, gone. As I leave the campus center, two girls ask me if I'd like a free copy of a book. They've got bags full of these books. The book is Wild Animus by Rich Shapero, an author I've never heard of. I figure he must be local, or otherwise affiliated with the University. I take my copy, thank the girls, and head back to my apartment. I promptly do a Google search on the author and his book, and learn the following: "Rich Shapero (born 1948) is an American venture capitalist, self-published writer, and musician. He grew up in Los Angeles and attended UC Berkeley where he graduated in 1970 with a degree in English literature." (Thanks, Wikipedia.) So, no. Not a local, not a student. And, of this book? "Shapero's book Wild Animus was released in 2004 using print-on-demand technology by his publishing company, Too Far. Initially 50,000 copies were printed, and copies of the book have been given away in for promotional purposes. Shapero has also published three CDs, "The Ram," "The Wolves," and "Animus," which were used in free promotional distribution, both separately and in a boxed set with the book." In other words, Shapero had been giving his book away for years all over the country, presumably because no one was buying it for money. Oof. This musical accompaniment to the novel intrigued me, and I decided to check out Shapero's book's website for more details. Apparently, neither the book nor the music tells the whole story of Wild Animus, and the two must be experienced in tandem for the full experience. I played along - the music streams on his site for free - expecting the tracks to be some sort of looping background music. Because how can you read to anything else? Instead, my ears were assaulted with very hard and heavy rock music, complete with over-the-top riffs, fast drumming, and wailing lyrics. The task at hand, as described, was purely impossible. I shelved the book hastily, and only recently today, during "Hurricane" Irene's assault on New England, did I pull it out for a reading. The book was actually a very quick read, but that may be because I skimmed more or less everything after the first few pages. Shapero, bless him for his efforts, simply isn't a good writer. This had been a suspicion of mine for a while, given that good authors usually don't insist their writing be experienced in tandem with death metal, and typically don't just give away their books on college campuses. Allow me to summarize what little plot I can. (And most of my own understanding has been gleaned from Shapero's website.) A young man falls in love for the first time, and enjoys that initial feeling of "surrender" so much that he decides to always live life on the edge. He moves to the Alaskan wilderness, where nature and wilderness overwhelm him and he may continue to feel both helpless and excited. He becomes fascinated with the Dall sheep, a wild Alaskan mountain goat, and begins to envision himself as a ram. In fact, the book is narrated in the third person, but passages are emboldened and italicized and written in the first person. In these parts, the main character envisions himself as a majestic, well, sheep. (Is he tripping on acid? Perhaps. I really have no idea.) The natural predator of the Dall sheep is the wolf. There are plenty of passages in which the main character, as a sheep, is being chased by wolves. Is this a metaphor for the thrill of being in love? Is it to be taken literally? Again, I'm not sure. The book feels half stream-of-consciousness at this point and half Animorphs. I'd give the author the benefit of the doubt in most cases, but in most cases I'm not reading a free book with an accompanying soundtrack. Eventually the main character creates a diety named "Animus" - or is Animus extant outside of his mind? - and becomes obsessed with Animus and being a ram and running from the wolves in the freezing Alaskan mountains. His girlfriend feels like she's been replaced, but then joins him in ram role-play/worship anyway, and by the book's end the dude is dying in the middle of nowhere being torn limb from limb by a pack of wolves. So, that's the story for you. It's unclear to me, again, how much of it is real and how much of it simply takes place in the ram-man's mind. I'm also unclear what the point of the novel was at all. I'm glad it doesn't matter. Here's another excerpt from Shapero's site: "Experienced as a whole, the music expresses the emotional core of the story and the novel serves as its narrative shell." Don't good writers convey emotion within their writing? I guess Shapero isn't even pretending to be a good writer. But then, that's okay. He's probably just an average Joe who really wanted to tell the world a story, for some reason, and I like that he followed through on his dream by publishing his own book and giving it away to college kids around the country. Amazon.com currently has 139 customer reviews for the book, and 90 of them are for one star out of five. But don't think that it even has that many "defenders;" "The most helpful favorable review" can be found right here, and is well worth a read. Actually, I was more entertained by that review than I was by Wild Animus, and that's without even handicapping the former for being 1/300 as long. Let this be a lesson to all of you out there, as if you needed to be told - you get what you pay for, and new books being given away for free are being given away for free for a reason.