Low Points

The thrill of seeing your name on the spine of a book gets you through some of the challenges of full-time writing – but not all of them. 

I did press tours in fourteen countries for The Drowning People and answered the same ten questions several hundred times.  I knew I should feel grateful for all the attention, but a lot of the time it made me want to crawl under a large rock.
 
Here’s a selection of the less flattering things people have said about me over the years.  Most are from well-known publications; I include a few that aren’t because they deserve to be rescued from internet oblivion:

• 'Richard Mason … writes like a guy who has been dead for about a hundred years' – People Magazine

• 'It would have taken a saint not to have tired of his pompous ruminations after a few minutes' – Sophia Hesselgren, New Statesman

• 'The Drowning People is humorless, prolix and severe in a way I can only describe as reactionary, as though Mason were personally offended by late-20th-century advances in narration' – Washington Post

• 'If there’s anyone left in this entire light-year-expanding universe who has somehow managed to escape the Penguin publicity machine, let me quickly bring you up to speed on who Richard Mason is.  He wrote The Drowning People in Prague when he was 18 and made loads of dosh.  On top of that, he looks very much like Horatio Hornblower.  And by all accounts he’s a deeply pleasant, modest and unassuming person.  None of this is his fault.  But it doesn’t prevent his debut novel, The Drowning People, from being an unspeakably dreadful book' – David Chater, Hampstead & Highgate Express 

• 'Richard Mason is touted on both sides of the Atlantic as the hottest young author in years – all for having written The Drowning People, a novel of aching, baffling mediocrity' – Chatelaine, Canada

• 'Plot, narrative, character: they have been neglected before by better writers than Mason, but not with such ruinous consequences' – The Observer

• 'By the time you’ve read this drivel you’ll have wished he murdered every other character – and topped himself, too'  – Maurice Haugh

• 'The Drowning People seems as though it were written by an octogenarian nun' – The Vancouver Sun

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