Wild Animus is a novel by Rich Shapero.
Gave up on: 9.8.2025

Plot:
Ransom Altman is a college student when he meets Lindy. They fall in love, but Ransom grows weary oft he life that seems to be beckoning them. After graduation, instead of settling down like everybody else, Ransom and Lindy head North, into the mountains where Ransom’s spiritual quest and his feeling of kinship with mountain rams combine.

Judging from what I googled about the book, my experience with it is pretty representative of everybody’s experience with it: receiving a free copy, trying to read it, hating and abandoning it soon after.

Over 20 years ago, on a trip to Berlin, me and my friends were handed ARCs of this book, together with, if I remember correctly, a shirt and bag and like 50 bookmarks. And we were not the only ones, they handed everybody in the popular area we were having dinner at a bag if they’d only take it. The book has been moving with me ever since, but I never cracked it open – until fate in the shape of a toddler took it off the shelf and pushed it into my hands and I finally decided to give it a go. I didn’t get far with it, though, before deciding that my time was really way too precious for this shit.

The entire thing is told from Ransom’s perspective and he is such a self-absorbed asshole that this is already quite a tough choice on its own. I rarely read books by men anymore, and even rarer when they’re told from a male point-of-view, and this book is again perfect proof for why I have grown so cautious (there are male authors I trust and that I will read anything by). Ransom is convinced that he is better than anybody else and that what he does is better than all those boring mainstream normies and their social conventions. But of course, he needs an adoring woman to witness his greatness, no matter that he treats Lindy like shit all of the time.

I was struggling with the book to begin with, but then came a scene where Ransom asks Lindy the day after they had sex whether he hurt her. When she wonders why he would think that (while I am wondering why he would only ask her the day after), he replies „because you groaned at the end“. At this point, I literally died. I had to text my friend because I couldn’t keep the absurdity to myself.

I knew then that I probably wouldn’t finish the book, but I read on for a bit (I didn’t have any other book with me), but then Ransom’s poetry, excuse me, his chants enter the picture more and more, and that was the final death blow for me.

Summarizing: insufferable.