How not to respond to a bad review

If it's not the craziest response ever by a novelist to a negative review, it's almost certainly the longest, most obsessive and most ridiculous. When Michael E Cohen reviewed an interactive ebook called Venice Under Glass on the Apple-related site TidBITS.com, he can't have expected that underneath it would eventually appear more than 50 responses from a single commenter: the book's author, Stephan J Harper.

Seemingly unembarrassed by the incongruity of mounting a vehement defence of a detective story in which all the characters are teddy bears, Harper initially penned a series of comments (many of them over a single night between 1am and 4am) in which he quoted passages from the book, hoping to persuade Cohen that his criticisms of its "workmanlike" prose or "juvenile" plot were unjustified.

Of these intended demonstrations of the book's brilliance, the one that has attracted most ridicule ("There were dozens and dozens of flowers in vases of all descriptions … scenting the air throughout like crazy. Some bear had sent her bright yellow and orange dozens, poised next to red, white and pink dozens") did so because Harper unwisely followed it with "that's straight out of Fitzgerald and Keats, my friend".

The fracas rumbled on for five months until TidBITS publisher Adam Engst closed comments on the piece earlier this week, explaining that he was "shocked by how this comment thread has gone viral" and had been moved to bring the discussion to an end after what he described as an "abuse-laden post" from Harper which included details about the reviewer's personal life.

For creative writing tutors, and for publishers and agents briefing their authors, the episode can be expected to join other replies to criticism – such as Candace Sams informing hostile Amazon reviewers she would be reporting them to the FBI – as an instructive instance of what not to do. Harper hasn't tried to match better-known writers' soundbites when biting back (Alain de Botton's "I will hate you till the day I die" to Caleb Crain, for example, or Martin Amis calling Tibor Fischer "a creep, a wretch and a fat-arse") but he has no rivals as to sheer number of authorial responses, turning a comment thread into a near-monologue. Say it once, or say nothing, would appear to be the lesson to be drawn from the spat. And at all costs avoid involving soft toys in your counter-attack.