That is one of the funniest book reviews I have ever read. Nasty and cruel, too, and to make sure the reviewer was correct, I actually went to Borders and looked at the thing.
The reviewer was incorrect. The thing (I cannot bring myself to call it a book) is WORSE.

I think the author of the review is the guy who writes the Gawker.com blog, but I'm not sure.

If you have any sense of justice at all, the publication of this book demands that you rouse yourself from the couch this very second and set out to loot and burn Manhattan. Meet us at Da Silvano and bring weapons.

It is a strange kind of fame, but you have to admire (very, very slightly) a person that creates and manages to get published a book that can inspire that kind of a review. (Note that I did not use the words write or author.) That much we can thank Plum Sykes for. (My God, is that a real name? I'm not sure if I really want to know . . .)

Having this item post at about the same time as Teresa's "Paris Hilton Autobiography" item is either evidence of synchronicity, or the imminent coming of the Yuga.

Plum is a nickname; her Christian name is Victoria. Not that I'm usually au fait with the habits of New York fashion journalists, but Saturday's Grauniad Weekend magazine had a (faintly sarky) profile of her.

I had to offer computer support to Plum and her sister Lucy back when I worked at Condescendingly Nasty for thirteen and a half years.

She's a real piece of work, I can assure you.

...man, if I poured my heart into the Great American Novel and got a review like this out of the friggin' New Yawk Times, I'd be on the first tramp steamer out of town headed towards the Republic of the Marshall Islands...

...maybe spend my days running a seedy little bar down by the docks on the Arno Atoll and never writing another word...

"... Plum and her sister Lucy ..."

Whose nickname, we must assume, is Land. Both of them doubtless related to the noted Shirley Gunderson Mercy.

I think the publication of the Spectacularly, Hideously Bad Book -- the Notably Awful Book, in fact -- and the attention such things so often receive, may say a couple of modestly significant things about The State of Publishing and Stuff. One is that most Bad Books are just, well, plainly bad; they are dull, their grammar is awkward, with the occasional howler, but someone of an editorial persuasion has taken Vise-Grips and Bondo to the rattliest bits, they displace not a brilliantly eccentric manuscript but another precisely as lame (though the other lame author will never believe this -- wait, wrong Nielsen Hayden blog thread). So when the Mutant Hellbook rises on its spavined limbs and pole-vaults "Good Morning," it taps a pressurized dome of critical frustration (not all of it acute or worthy, but that's another essay), and the Dead Book is staked in its native earth by the Killer Review. At the very least, it's a change of pace from saying the same things about the same writers, or even saying different things about the same writers, or . . . you get the idea. People watch talk shows so they can see what a Writer So Bad They've Heard of Him/Her looks like. Eventually the party mood passes, and we return to the usual cycle of military romances and meaningful, human, not-sf-on-your-tintype novels about space amoebas and the Holden Caulfield Clone Wars, and the water is again calm, until the shark music starts again.

This has been "All Metaphors Considered," brought to you by a generous grant from Pulp, the Display Technology of Tomorrow.

(somersaults in joy)

Emma, did you see the sample text from the Garfield movie novelization before Amazon took it down?

Jakob, is a sarky profile anything like a shirty article?

Jack K., your flinch of imaginative sympathy is why you'll never write a book like that. Or anyway, I hope you won't.

Bergdorf Blondes can't be worse than Black Body, and as far as I know H. C. Turk is not only alive, but still writing.

Cha, I'm all over the place. Scott, I meant to also say, "Yes? Go on? Do tell?"

Elric says, "You think this is something," (says he who has been eperiencing Pulp from Miramax, publisher of Said Horrible Book) "wait till Bling comes out."

It's even longer.

(Nancy inserts her own note here: He told me it was a Cinderella story done as hip-hop. No, I was not tempted to peek over his shoulder. I've been nauseated of late without the use of outside influences.)

... "we can smuggle it into the future. Perhaps the next breed of humanoids can learn from the holocaust of culture and commerce that destroyed our icky civilization."

But what happens if, like that Star Trek (TOS) ep, the future intelligent lifeforms take it as a revelation and decide to follow it as an Ideal Civilization?

The horror; the horror ...

Teresa: indeed, though quite what the hierarchy is I'm not sure. Maybe:
sarcastic profile
sardonic feature
acerbic article
shirty spread
caustic column
destroying review OF DOOM (q.v.)?

The Grauniad piece is here.

Choire Sicha is certainly funny. He mentions Candace Bushnell in his article, and I can testify from personal experience that her 'Trading Up' deserves a similar treatment. My, what a pile of badly written nonsense that was, with it's snarky treatment of a thinly disguised Jonathan Franzen for that bit of literary je-ne-sais-quoi. Brrr. Wish I was as clever as Sicha, then I could write a scathing review of my own.
And yes, Jon H, he writes for Gawker.

is a sarky profile anything like a shirty article

Well, a "sark" is an old word for a kind of dress or tunic, so come to think of it, yeah. (At first I thought it was a misspelling of snarky. But I like this better.)

I always thought that "sarky" was short for "sarcastic".

Yes, sarky is a Britspeak shortening of sarcastic. Whether it is in any way related to snarky, I don't know.

most Bad Books are just, well, plainly bad; they are dull, their grammar is awkward, with the occasional howler, but someone of an editorial persuasion has taken Vise-Grips and Bondo to the rattliest bits, they displace not a brilliantly eccentric manuscript but another precisely as lame (though the other lame author will never believe this

Though the sentence I've excerpted could perhaps use a touch of the glue-stick itself, you are of course correct. And as someone with calluses on his fingers from wielding those implements, as well as copious amounts of baling wire and chewing gum, not to mention excessive buffing with a rat-tail file and several grades of sandpaper, and the occasional spot-solder, I can testify as much from my own experience. But every now and then, there arrives something so transcendently bad, in an Edward D. Wood kinda way, that one can only throw up one's hands and run screaming from the room. But, no--there's a job to be done. Am I a man or a mouse? Fortunately, for me, help is somewhere at hand. The author says, don't touch my deathless prose. Stet, stet, stet! Okay, it's your funeral...

I must check out Ms. Sykes's work. Like the work of Mr. Turk, a truly bad book is a rare jewel to be treasured...

And a "bear sarker" was a guy who wore a bearskin shirt and went nutso in battle. Hence 'berserker'. Sarcastic bears must find a different name.

(I'm sure the old word for 'bear' was a little different, but I can't look it up now.)

No, it is a "bare sarker". One who runs into battle in his sark, i.e. without shield or armor.