When you're a famous author and some uppity journalist writes a 3,700 article lambasting you, how do you fight back? A withering, razor-sharp retort, sent into the editor? By holding your head high, confident you make more per word than your attacker does per story?

Well, close: if you're Michael Crichton, you write a novel featuring your critic, The New Republic's Michael Crowley, as a small-dicked child rapist named Mick Crowley. Here's the charming passage Crichton wrote about Mick/Mike in his new novel, Next:

The defendant, thirty-year-old Mick Crowley, was a Washington-based political columnist who was visiting his sister-in-law when he experienced an overwhelming urge to have anal sex with her young son, still in diapers. Crowley was a wealthy, spoiled Yale graduate and heir to a pharmaceutical fortune. ... It turned out Crowley's taste in love objects was well known in Washington, but [his lawyer]–as was his custom–tried the case vigorously in the press months before the trial, repeatedly characterizing Alex and the child's mother as "fantasizing feminist fundamentalists" who had made up the whole thing from "their sick, twisted imaginations." This, despite a well-documented hospital examination of the child. (Crowley's penis was small, but he had still caused significant tears to the toddler's rectum.)

As it turns out, Michael Crowley is a Yale graduate and a political reporter, although probably not a sex criminal. Crowley is taking it all in stride, though: "I find myself strangely flattered... If someone offers substantive criticism of an author, and the author responds by hitting below the belt, as it were, then he's conceding that the critic has won."

Michael Crichton: Jurassic Prick [The New Republic]