Wild Animus

Rich Shapero’s WILD ANIMUS Book App, designed specifically for the iPad, seamlessly integrates his original novel and music with incredible visual imagery to create a unified storytelling experience. This multimedia Book App is a reinvention of the novel and is available as a free download.

About WILD ANIMUS:

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.


About the Author:

Rich Shapero is a writer and musician whose multimedia storytelling projects pioneer unseen worlds.

At the heart of his stories are vast wildernesses, populated by mercurial private gods who promise deliverance to truer, more profound states of being. But transcendence demands sacrifice, and the paths of his protagonists are fraught with danger, dread and violence.



Combining lucid prose with entrancing music, Rich conjures immersive visionary landscapes and characters who struggle to achieve summits of personal fulfillment.


Features Include:

• Unique interactive music player and beautiful visual art imagery in book mode.
• Dynamic one-touch page turn.
• Three full-length digital albums containing 39 original tracks written by Rich Shapero with
several contributing artists including Maria Taylor (Azure Ray), Orenda Fink (Azure Ray), Marc Ribot, Iva Bittova, Andy LeMaster (Bright Eyes), Rob Powell, Airto Moreira, Jim Campilongo, Mike Marshall and several others.
•Visual art section containing stunning high-resolution images from renowned Swiss Outsider Artist, François Burland.