Customer Reviews

Wild Animus: A Novel

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(12)
1 star:		(90)

 

 

I, like many others, received this book for free. But unlike others, I found this book a delight to have around the house.

It served quite well as a monitor riser for my LCD screen.

My friend and I needed a book to add weight for a tofu press.

Pages 200 to 225 made wonderful firestarters when covered in paraffin wax.

One night, we took the cover and walked around the downtown Seattle area hiding our faces behind it and saying "Wooo, wolf eyes, scawwy wolf eyes", while three people behind us kept asking people "Have you seen the walruses?" in Scooby-Doo voices.

One night we drank too much and began reading the worst prose we could find in voices like Darth Vader and Mickey Mouse over a microphone to loud techno music. People apparently loved this prose more than Lynne Cheney's book on lesbian sexual relationships.

The cat ate pages 123 to 127 when we ran out of catgrass for him to chew.

The door below sometimes slams shut when coming in and out of the apartment, so rather than going out to buy a doorstop, we use the book!

Every so often you can pick a random phrase out of it that makes you howl with laughter.

Handing it to someone who's taken more than six hits of acid in their lifetime and asking them whether it's accurate in the description is highly amusing - especially when you get their faces to screw up like you've just asked them to kill the baby Jesus with a rusty spork.

It is an excellent candidate for book frisbee on a sunny afternoon in the park.

I take it with me when camping in the case that I run out of toilet paper.

Gosh, I'm sure I could find more excellent uses for this most entertaining book. If paper cuts were something desired, I'm sure you could add that as a bonus, since the cheap paper on the books provides HUNDREDS of those to the reader.

However, you might not want to expose your cortex to the language. It puts me in mind of the Douglas Adams characters, the Vogons, whose poetry is only the third worst in the galaxy. That, in of itself, is a distinction.

Like the movie Showgirls, this book is so jaw-droppingly bad that it's an entertaining read just to see how badly a book COULD be written. It's not just a gigantic cliche, it's a cliched parody of every 1960s novel or poem written by every poet or writer seeking truth within the American experience.

So if nothing else, it's a marvelous book to be used for anything except reading.

This is easily one of the worst books I have ever read. It's difficult to believe that a publisher can have read this manuscript and thought it was publishable. Why, wait a minute! The publishing house, Too Far, was founded by this book's author, Richard Shapero! Well, that explains the lack of serious editing or promotion.

"Wild Animus" is a fantasy about the 60's. By "fantasy", I mean that it is a story written by someone who knows nothing about the 60's and made things up as he went along. The main characters, Sam and Lindy, are fictional hippies who speak in stilted diatribes about enlightenment, empowerment and oppression. All written by an author who apparently has never been enlightened, empowered or oppressed.

The dialog throughout reads like someone who has never heard a conversation, and has only read bad poetry in translation. The actions are those of people who have no sense.

I canot, cannot believe anyone would consider this book publishable, let alone start his own company with the intention of publishing it. Please do not read this book.

This is just awful. I know the author travels in the Alaska wilderness, etc, but he can't write worth a damn.
Animus means "mind" or "hostility". It does not mean what this clown thinks it means.
This is about a man who goes crazy and thinks he's a wild mountain sheep. His girlfriend supports him by waiting tables while he hikes around Mount Wrangell, working up the nerve to throw himself in and hallucinating that he is a sheep, and that his girlfriend is a pack of wolves who chase him, and that inside the (volcanic) mountain there is a god who will somehow save everyone by releasing their emotions.
None of the characters seem real. The prose is turgid and wordy, adejective laden and irksome. How many times do I need to be told about a meadow full of Alaska wildflowers? And why would I CARE about this idiot who mutilates himself and dances around on a mountain. In addition, the 1960s "setting" is totally unconvincing. This maniac belongs in the men's movement, "shaman" and "power animal" craze of the 1990s. No one in the 60s talked or acted like that. The author knows nothing about LSD, which is the excuse for most of the sheep segments of the novel (sorry, can't think of something else to call them.)
I will never read anything by this guy again. No wonder the book was free. Who would pay for this trash?

If you've been overdosing on good literature, this is the perfect palette-cleanser. The plot is so bone-simple you can't get lost, but the characters are so nonsensical and/or interchangeable that keeping up with their moods is happily futile. And it's wrapped in prose so pretentious and overwrought, you'll laugh yourself to sleep every night. But I should let the book speak for itself.

The following paragraph comes right after the protagonist and a random girl have stumbled out of a tear-gas cloud on a rioting college campus. They've washed their eyes out in a restaurant bathroom, and they look at each other for the first time:

"He drew the towels away. Through the resolving blur, he saw hair divided in the middle of her crown, a pyramid of high forehead, and cheeks bounded by sickle-shaped locks that pricked her chin. Her eyes were blue, fixed on him with the gravest stare he'd ever seen. He waited for her to bow her head, to turn, to laugh - but she didn't flinch. What made those great gulfs of eyes? And how could she invite a stranger to fathom them? Sam gazed deeper, imagining he saw the bottoms of rugged canyons in her eyes, the dark foundation of a different world. A hidden joy flickered in the depths, burning amid a consuming sorrow, and as he focused on that brightness, it blazed up, hopeful. Without thinking, his heart went out to her. There was no foundation here, only the desperate longing for one, more solid and lasting than the world she knew."

Then they converse briefly and pseudo-deeply. Like a master comic, Shapero draws the reader on a bit before finally whipping out the punchline:

"Sam struggled to meet her gaze, discomposed by the thought that the sorrow he'd imagined in her was nothing but a mirror of his own troubled state."

DUN DUN DUUUUUN!!!

Fantastic.

(Oh yeah, and the girl becomes his soulmate. Which spoils the farce a little, I think, but it's still the passage I cite when I tell people about the joy I've found in "Wild Animus.")

This novel is filled with flowery language polluted with pseudo-psychobabble and redundant geological metaphors. It is a quasi-fictional delusion of grandeur dealing with a drug-dependent, over-educated schizophrenic who comes from a dysfunctional home. After being tear-gassed at a college riot, he finds the younger, less schizophrenic version of himself. The two flee to the Northwest, where their pathetic plight to achieve a primal enlightenment ends in a leap of false-faith. A perfect example of a bad book.

Wild Animus is likely the worst book I have ever read. While the basic idea is good, and what drew me to read it in the first place, it gets lost under a lot of pseudo-intellectual nonsense blathered by the singularly unconvincing characters. Much of it is preachy drug-addled nonsense, and its treatment of the honorable practice of shamanism is deplorable. Lindy couldn't be more of a caricature if she tried.

At best it's mildly interesting, and at worst it's overwritten, navel-gazing nostalgia for something that never happened. I'm honestly surprised a real publisher picked this thing up, instead forcing the author to publish it by vanity press, where it would be in good company with volumes of messages from angels and the memoirs of alien abductees.

I wouldn't recommend it to a single soul, and the only reason I can see for purchasing it would be to prop up a wobbly table, though it might also be useful for lighting a fire at your next barbeque.

This is the worst book I have ever come across in my life. I received this book for free while leaving the state fair and my immediate response was, wow, it must be really horrible if they have to give it away. Now, I really don't consider myself as an ultra-intellectual but I can confidently say that this book is not well written, creative or groundbreaking in anyway. It seemed to me that this guy was a man with a lot of money or some kind of "in" and got this book published by mistake. My roommates and me actually use this book as bathroom entertainment and highlight passages that we find comical. So if you happen to come across this book, take it, by all means, but if you are going to read it, you might get more enjoyment out of it if you look at it as if it were meant to be comedic.

Needless to say I didn't care for this book one bit. The main character is entirely wrapped up in his drug world never to return. The main female character is treated poorly and never attempts to help herself or change her situation. I found nothing redeeming about this book at all.

It's the '60's in Berkeley. Lindy & Sam, awash in drugs, hook up in one of the most bizarre co-dependent relationships you'll ever read about.

Lessons Rich Shapero needs to learn:

1. Just because you think you have something to say doesn't mean you can write worth a damn.

2. If you are going to self-publish, please spend some money on an editor!

3. LSD-induced ramblings are interesting only to other people who are tripping.

4. Don't quit your day job.

By page 30 I was so bored I just couldn't continue. The back of the book sounded so promising-- the quest to understand life and meaning! But the first 30 pages are nothing but dialogue, and I guess there's one scene in there.

The two characters are completely overdrawn, I felt like I was watching a melodramatic Anime movie where the woman's eyes are twice as big as her head. Honestly, men, if a woman told you the day you met her that you should search inside your soul and follow the calling of your heart, you would think she was a nut job, wouldn't you? You might want to see how wild she is in bed, but you wouldn't seriously think, "Oh yeah, the calling of my heart, why didn't I think of that?"

Rather than showing the emotions the characters go through, the author resorts to just listing them. Picking a page at random, the emotions Sam observes in Lindy's eyes are: mystical, fixed on distant joy, yearning, loneliness, despair, hope, energy, speed, breathless, relief, surprise. Really, those fourteen words are the only place where the dialogue ceases.

And what absurd dialogue it is. The characters, who have known each other about half an hour now, talk about the deep, dark secrets of their dramatically messed up families.