Wild Animus

Indulge me for a moment while I take a break from my studying.

See that book cover? I'm going to start off with a little anecdote.

So on Monday, I was heading toward the bus stop to meet my friend S when a couple of strangers on campus reached out and handed me a novel. They had boxes of these books and were handing them out to passersby for free, so I thought, "Well, why not? Who doesn't like books?" When I met up with S, it turned out they had handed her one too.

We finally took our seats on the bus, and that's when I first read the summary on the back of the book. Since I'm such a nice person, I'm going to transcribe it for you right here:

Wild Animus tracks the reckless quest of Ransom Altman, a young Berkeley graduate who - roused by his literary heroes and love for his girlfriend Lindy - resolves to live in a new world of "inexhaustible desire."

Ransom's deepening identification with the wild mountain ram, whose passion and wisdom he seeks, drives the young lovers north - first to Seattle, then to the remote Alaskan wilderness. Alone on the unforgiving ridges of Mt. Wrangell, his imagination increasingly unhinged, Ransom begins to devise and act out a dangerous animal mythos, which he documents in a first-person manuscript, and in songs or "chants" that detail his transformation and pursuit by a pack of strangely familiar wolves.

The feverish hunt leads from the wilds to civilization and back again. And when the lovers return to brave the perilous mountain together, the truth behind Ransom's imagined transformation emerges. What they discover in those frozen heights threatens their love as well as their sanity and their lives.

Is Ransom inspired by a transcendent truth, or prey to a misguided fantasy? As his grip on reality weakens, the reader shares Ransom's fears, his hopes, and his extraordinary discoveries.

Wild Animus is a search for the primordial and a journey to the breaking point. It is a story of love and surrender, of monomania - of striving, at all costs, for a bliss beyond fear.

Okay. Now for some reading comprehension, kiddos!

1. What is meant by "inexhaustible desire"? How is this to be achieved by migrating to Alaska?
2. Why is the protagonist chased by a pack of wolves? What constitutes as "strangely familiar"? Do they look like Balto?
3. Heck, what in the blazes is this story about?

I will admit, as someone with a deep interest in literature and writing, I am predisposed to skepticism when it comes to books acquired by a publisher in San Mateo -- a city near my hometown in the Bay Area -- especially when it is a truth universally known that most of the major publishing houses reside in New York City. My first thought was vanity publishing, which would explain why the author would be doling out free copies of his book on a college campus. Not that I have anything against vanity press -- my mom wrote and illustrated two children's picture books, which have been great teaching tools for her art classes and neat gifts for some of our young acquaintances. Curiosity piqued, as soon as I returned to my dorm I resorted to the paranormal-heroine-with-a-crush-on-a-mysterious-guy's first line of action -- Google.

My first hit was on Amazon, to my great surprise. Even more amazing was that the book had garnered 129 reviews -- the majority of which rated the book only one star. The few that gave the book five stars were mainly tongue-in-cheek, like this one:

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.

With a little more Internet snooping, I soon gathered a couple of facts:

• It's not just a novel. If you examine the back cover closely, a note at the bottom says: "This novel is part of a larger storytelling experiment that includes three music CDs. Experienced as a whole, the music expresses the emotional core of the story, and the novel serves as its narrative shell."
• This book was first published in 2004. Since then, the book has been distributed for free all over the country (you'd be surprised -- it's literally popped up everywhere) and even in cities like Tokyo and Amsterdam. It's been six years, and they're still going at it -- now in Durham, North Carolina.
• The author has been very successful in the IT industry -- which would explain how he's been able to finance the mass distribution of this book for the last six years.
• In short, according to the Amazon reviewers, this book is essentially about a guy with an LSD addiction who hallucinates that he is a ram and dies in the Alaskan wilderness.
  

Now, I haven't read the book yet and don't particularly have any intention of doing so (at least, not until winter break, but even then I have other books much higher on my to-read list). I will however, explain why I already have a sour impression of this book.

My friend S and my roommate became well acquainted with my dislike of this book without having ever read it -- my roommate thought I was being mean and overly critical, while S is an engineer who admitted that she was ambivalent and really didn't care about the book. I, however, am somebody who is well-read about the publishing industry and is also a writer -- therefore, is it any surprise that I have much more beef with this book?

A lot of the Amazon users bashed the book and complained about how they wasted their time. I'm not following that vein -- honestly, if a book is that bad, I usually skip to the end or Wikipedia it and then just stop reading. Really, I think there's so many negative reviews simply because it's fun to bash things as a mob.

What DOES irk me about this whole business is the mass distribution part of this whole affair. My roommate said she feels sorry for the author for receiving all that negative feedback and says I'm being too harsh. And from a writer's perspective, I sympathize with receiving such criticism -- but only to an extent. If he had distributed the book so enthusiastically for a year and then recognized that many people did not like his story or writing style, then okay -- I get it. All writers inevitably face criticism, and it can be brutal for first-time writers. But the fact that six years later, this book is STILL being distributed for free? What in the world is he trying to achieve? It's one thing to learn from the mistakes of your first book to motivate you to improve your writing -- it's another to keep pushing the same first book.

Keep in mind that as far as I know, this book was published via vanity press or POD. That means the author did not undergo the query process, which is essentially a screening process for hopeful writers. If your manuscript's not good enough, no agent is going to help you get it published. While it can be very discouraging, the brutality of rejection is what forces the most determined writers to grow and hone their skills.

Perhaps from a marketing perspective, this guy should be lauded. Articles and blog posts have been written about him since 2004 -- hell, even I'm writing about this book. However, from my perspective as a writer, this guy doesn't understand what it means to be a writer. Your first novel might be crap and it might be ridiculed, but writing is an unending learning process. I've had many setbacks with EP, but it's thrilling to think about how much I've learned and grown since I first created the story in 2007. Rather than writer, the author strikes me as either a businessman or somebody trying to make a critique/point about publicity and marketing.