Morrissey has said negative reviews of his debut novel List of the Lost, which was deemed “dreadful”, “laughably clunky” and “monstrously overwritten”, are personal attacks on him, rather than responses to the book.

“I strongly believe in freedom of expression and critics have to say what they have to say,” he wrote, in an email interview with a Chilean website (via Contact Music). “But often the criticisms are an attack against me as a human being and have nothing to do with what they’re reading.”

When asked about how badly List of the Lost, published in September, was received, Morrissey said critics couldn’t express “moral indignation” about the novel’s storyline because they did not like how the book was written. “It wasn’t written for you,” he said. “You cannot try to work out what you think the author should have written instead of what he actually wrote.”

The book’s plot centres around a four-person relay track team in 1970s America, who are cursed when one of their members kills a man in the woods. Critics panned Morrissey’s characterisation as well as his approach to writing sex scenes and dialogue. In the Guardian’s first-take review blogpost, Michael Hann urged readers not to buy the book, writing: “Do not sully yourself with it, no matter how temptingly brief it seems.” Elsewhere, the Guardian’s review said the book was “utter garbage”, while in the Observer, Ed Cumming wrote that the book’s publishers “should be ashamed of themselves” for bringing the book to print.

In response to a question about whether critics skew the relationship between the author and the reader, Morrissey wrote that most critics “want to start something that might bring them a bit of attention because they want it to be about them and their own personal taste. Nothing moves forwards in a world like this. If you ask the public not to buy the book, you’ve given the book a level of attention which you don’t want.”