Every novelist's fantasy

... is to hit a sharp-tongued critic in the face with a baseball bat. Or at least a cream pie. The latter fantasy came true, last night, for novelist Rick "Ice Storm" Moody, who in a 2002 review was described by The New Republic's Dale Peck as "the worst writer of his generation."

And that was just for starters. Here's more of what Peck had to say, in the course of reviewing Moody's "The Black Veil": "His intelligence does not make up for the badness of his books." * "What most readers think of as the subject of a story has [no] role in a Moody project beyond giving his tangled prose something to wrap itself around, the way a vine will wrap itself around the nearest thing to hand, be it trellis, tree, or trash." * "[His novels] bear the same relationship to Moody's career as his subjects do to his prose: the former come across as little more than a prop for the latter, incidental, interchangeable." * "I have stared at pages and pages of Moody's prose and they remain as meaningless to me as the Korean characters that paper the wall of a local restaurant." * "[Moody's 'The Black Veil' is] the latest in what I have come to regard as a series of imitations or echoes of Moody's more talented, or at any rate more authentically individual, peers."

At a Brooklyn fundraiser for the writers' retreat Sangam House last night, we read in an entry posted by ex-Ideas editor Jennifer Schuessler to The New York Times's books blog, Paper Cuts, Peck finally got what was coming to him. For every $5 raffle ticket sold, Moody would move one inch closer to his target, from a starting point 9 feet away. Schuessler filmed what happened next:

It actually looks as though Peck enjoyed the whole thing more than Moody did...