Self-published novelist Jacqueline Howett is best known for writing one two-word sentence: "Fuck off!" She expectorated this at the end of March in a comment thread following an online review of her perfectly titled self-published novel, The Greek Seaman.
As much of the Internet has enjoyed learning, the critic -- Big Al of Big Al's Books and Pals -- had the temerity to point out Howett's tendency to commit sentence-level atrocities like "Don and Katy watched hypnotically Gino place more coffees out at another table with supreme balance."
Howett then took to the Internet to defend herself, a cause that resulted in several more sentence-level atrocities. When commenters pointed out that she seemed petty and clueless, she lashed out with the first of two "Fuck off"s. The effects were quick: an anti-Howett dogpile in the comment thread, sneering reports on blog after blog, and a flurry of one-star reviews of The Greek Seaman on Amazon, mostly from people who clearly haven't read the book.
Still, one of those reviews is a masterpiece of dirty snark.
Consider the work of Dunning Kruger, who as of yet has written no other reviews.
This stands right up there with the best of bullshit online reviews: the Topeka Abortionplex on Yelp, Amazon's dark exegeses of Bill Keane's Family Circus works, the Amazon reviews of that absurd steering-wheel desk, and even lesser-known entries in the genre, like this heart-rending account of life with a Tempurpedic.
The Greek Seaman now has 86 one-star reviews out of 106 total. I can't help but wonder: Is this much hating commensurate with her crime? As long as we have racist pricktards commenting on any news story about immigration or urban crime, saying "Fuck off!" to a reviewer (even a good one, like Big Al!) is hardly the worst thing put online any day.
In fact, it's a lot more sensible and controlled than Howett's own eventual apology over all this.
Hey, you could do worse than following @studiesincrap and the Exhibitionist blog at @ExhibitionistSF on the Twitter thing.
