Fox News host Glenn Beck's apocalyptic political thriller has shrugged off a pile of bad reviews to debut at number one on the New York Times bestseller list this week.

The story of a young, handsome PR executive's quest to save America from a 100-year-old plot to destroy it, The Overton Window was described as "didactic, discursive [and] sporadically incoherent" in the Los Angeles Times, and as "not just a bad book ... an instructively bad book because it offers a complete colour-by-numbers picture of the contemporary Wingnut psyche" in the Daily Beast.

"Thrillers often are marred by laughable prose, but few have stumbled along with language as silly as this one," added the Washington Post, pointing to hero Noah's reaction on meeting his true love, patriot Molly, for the first time: "Something about this woman defied a traditional chick-at-a-glance inventory." The Los Angeles Times agreed. "You really can't make this stuff up," wrote its reviewer, Tim Rutten, before singling out the same passage: "Without a doubt, all the goodies were in all the right places, but no mere scale of one to 10 was going to do the job this time. It was an entirely new experience for him. Though he'd been in her presence for less than a minute, her soul had locked itself onto his senses, far more than her substance had."

Despite this, Beck's army of fans sent the thriller racing to the top of the New York Times fiction bestseller list, ahead of the latest outing for Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander in The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest. "We got the news last night, how appropriate, it will be on the New York Times list for the July 4th weekend premiering at number one. It's driving the New York Times crazy. It's driving every author crazy," said Beck. "It is driving every pseudohistorian and I say pseudohistorian because I think they have so twisted history, they don't even know what's true anymore, that the books that we talk about on the show go to number one."

The rightwing presenter describes the novel as "faction" in his introduction, part of the category of "completely fictional books with plots rooted in fact", and predicted that his "critics will be fierce and unforgiving". "They will accuse me of being every kind of conspiracy theorist they can invent – and they will base it all on the plot of a novel that they likely never even read," he wrote.

Readers on Amazon were more positive about the book. Giving it five stars, JadedD called Beck "the Ayn Rand of our time", although perhaps damned The Overton Window in the eyes of some by saying that "the most notable part of this book is the title". Mom4honor only gave the novel three stars but said that she thanked God every day for Beck. "He is the voice of reason in an unreasonable world! Some call the millions of his listeners brainwashed, and to some extent I agree. Our brains have been washed and cleansed of the outright lies we've been fed by those whom we trusted with guarding our liberty," she wrote.

The Overton Window is Beck's sixth number-one bestseller. According to his publisher, Simon & Schuster, he has previously reached the top spot with An Inconvenient Book, The Christmas Sweater, Glenn Beck's Common Sense, Arguing With Idiots, and the children's version of The Christmas Sweater.