More Authors Behaving Badly: Richard Brittain

A while back, I wrote about some examples of authors behaving badly (here and here). In the second piece, I briefly mentioned the case of Richard Brittain who tracked down a teenager who had written a bad review of his work and smashed her over the head with a wine bottle.

Now we learn that Brittain pled guilty to the 2104 assault last Monday (see The Gawker British Writer Tracks Down Teen Who Gave His Book a Bad Review, Smashes Her With Wine Bottle). Along with this news we have more details of the story (all cribbed from the Gawker article).

The story begins when Richard Brittain posted an unfinished version of his book, The World Rose, on Wattpad, an app where amateur writers post their stuff and others review it. The finished book is still for sale on Amazon with the synopsis:

An epic fairytale romance set in a semi-fictional ancient world, containing elements of action, adventure, poetry and comedy. The title has a triple meaning: the central character is a renowned beauty - ‘the rose of the world’ - while the rose flower features heavily in the plot, and it also implies that the world rose up. When Ronwind Drake discovers treasures in a distant paradise, a new golden age seems set to begin, but Ella Tundra will find that all which glitters is not gold as she faces many obstacles in her quest for true love.

The negative reviewer in question was Paige Rolland, whose critical remarks included:

As a reader, I’m bored out of my skull and severely disappointed in what I might have paid for. As a writer (albeit an amateur one) I’m appalled that anyone would think this was worthy of money.  

Not only does it begin with “once upon a time” which you could argue is perfect as this is a fairytale (and it doesn’t work, it’s incredibly pretentious), but it’s filled with many writing no-nos. Way too much telling, pretentious prose, and a main character that I already hate. Ella is the perfect princess (true to fairytales, so we can at least give him a little credit despite how painfully annoying this is coupled with a complete lack of real personality shining through).

Rolland also noted that Brittain “has gained a bit of infamy on Wattpad where he’s known for threatening users who don’t praise him (pray for me).”

Brittain tracked down Rolland’s Facebook page, discovered that she lived in Scotland and worked at an Asda supermarket. He then traveled 500 miles from London, found her at the store, crouching to stock a low shelf of cereal boxes, and hit her from behind with a full bottle of wine, leaving her unconscious and with a gash on her head.

Brittain was also a self-confessed stalker in another case. The perfect princess of his novel, Ella Tundra, was apparently based on a woman he described targeting  in a blog post called “The Benevolent Stalker.” “Eventually, she contacted the police,” he wrote. “I was called by a policewoman and told that I had to stop contacting her.” Until he decided to contact her again. “On Valentine’s Day 2014, I sent her another card, with an elaborate drawing of a wild scene. In it, she became the character Ella Tundra, and that is how The World Rose began.”

Brittain has since updated the post to acknowledge it was “deluded and creepy,” and that he’s “now getting treatment.” “There is no such thing as benevolent stalking,” he wrote, “This is now crystal clear to me. I was totally wrong. No means no.”