Book Review: Too Far

This book is creepy.

There, I said it. And no, I don't mean "this book is eerie," like an Edgar Allen Poe story. That would have been just fine. Nor do I mean, "this book is scary" a la Silence of the Lambs or Devil in the White City. I enjoyed both of those quite a bit. No, I mean this book is creepy, creepy like that guy on the subway who isn't actually doing anything wrong, but he keeps staring at you and not saying anything and you're relieved when you reach your stop and can get away from him. That is what this book is like, and the CD it came with isn't much better.

Before I go on, let me backtrack a bit. A while back, a hipster-looking guy was sighted on my college campus with a massive cardboard box filled with shiny new hardback books bundled with CDs. He claimed they were free, that the book was called Too Far by a Mr. Rich Shapero, that they were part of an artist's promotional project, and would I please take one away? Please?

Well, the cover was pretty, I felt a little sorry for the hipster, and hey, who am I to turn down free books and music? After confirming that this was not merely a sneakier attempt to convert me by the crazy preachers who sometimes show up on campus ranting about heathens (I did not want to open this thing up and find it was dedicated to Pat Robertson), I agreed to take one off his hands and went on my merry way.

Well, well, well. Little did I know what I was in for. The book starts with an innocuous if trite premise: six-year-old Robbie is living in the wilds of Alaska with his two parents and their floundering marriage when he meets Fristeen (yeah, I know), also six, who lives with her drug-addled mother down the road. The two form an immediate, intense bond, and spend the summer exploring the woods, making up stories, and having thrilling adventures. Sounds harmless enough, right? Maybe kind of sweet, in a Bridge to Terabithia sort of way.

Alas, that's where you're wrong. The children have misadventures, yes, and also talk and think like they're stoners in their twenties, run around naked, at one point actually get a hold of hash brownies and get high (yeah, I know), spy on random people copulating in the forest (whose identities will be an eleventh-hour plot point), invent their own trippy religion, befriend a taxidermy moose head, and contemplate what, as the story progresses, sounds horrifically like a suicide pact.

The inside cover stipulates that this charming tale is a "parable," presumably to ward off most sane peoples' distress and disgust at reading about a sexually charged relationship between six-year-olds, with a side of druggy overtones. For heaven's sake, Mr. Shapero, would it have been so hard to make them even a few years older, to make the forest deities who keep showing up to spout meaningless pseudo-philosophy sound a little less like acid hallucinations?

Weirdly enough, there actually is a sympathetic character with a coherent subplot buried in here, in the form of Robbie's mother, a normal woman watching her idealism and marriage fade in the wake of her husband's selfishness, but both Robbie and the author display an astonishing contempt for her, so that hardly matters.

But then, as I later found out, Mr. Shapero, a wealthy venture capitalist laboring under the delusion that he's a great artist, has been up to these tricks before. Odd as this book was, it apparently pales in comparison to his earlier work, Wild Animus, a book with reviews so bad I almost want to read it now, about a canonically drug-addled man running around dressed like a mountain goat to the annoyance of his overly passive girlfriend in the name of spiritual enlightenment. That was also self-published and distributed with matching CDs by hipsters (for the curious, the Too Far CD, called Dawn Remembers, sounds like the random guitar strummings of really stoned people, occasionally blended with some old-fashioned haunted house organ music). It seems Mr. Shapero genuinely believes he has a great artistic message for the world, and is willing to spend an amazing amount of time and money trying to convince others of this. It's actually rather sad, when you think about it.

So if you see a hipster in a college town near you, and he politely doffs his beanie and offers you free stuff, take care, dear readers, or you may find yourself going . . . Too Far.