Well, where do I begin when it comes to my dissatisfaction with this product?

I’ve always been led to believe that this novel was a classic, which would provide me with weeks of non-stop literary pleasure. Instead of which, I woke up at 9am, on the day Amazon Prime promised that my “pleasurable” item would arrive, to find my husband lying dead beside me. Pleasure, indeed! I spent the rest of the morning watching the paramedics desperately trying to revive him, followed by a long consultation with the coroner, which meant that I missed my 10am appointment with the podiatrist.

Thank you very much, Amazon!

When I finally made it home from the mortuary, it turned out that I’d also missed my delivery, all because Bleak House was too big to fit in my mail box! Is this really the kind of unprofessionalism I’m expected to deal with from the greatest novelist of the Victorian era? I immediately renounced every word that Dickens has ever written, checked out several of his “novels” from the library, lit the barbeque in my back yard, and was busy feeding every single book into the flames when the phone rang. It was my daughter. In all the confusion, I’d forgotten to tell her about her father.

Thank you very much, Charles fucking Dickens!

The irony was that she was actually phoning to tell me that her own novel, My Father’s Daughter: A tale of love and devotion, was to be published by Penguin after several years of rejection. When I told her the sad news, however, the phone went silent, and there was a loud “bang”, which I could only assume was my grief-stricken daughter shooting herself point-blank in the face.

I was contacted by the police, headed back to the mortuary again, and missed Amazon’s second attempt to deliver my package!

Charles Dickens? If he was alive today, I’d beat him to death!

Eventually, the package was delivered, but I spent the next week in an alcoholic coma, only getting out of bed to take my regular anti-depressants, in order to deal with the sorrow, anger, and raw hatred that accompanied my every waking moment. As such, I have no hesitation in awarding this “classic” novel ONE star. It has destroyed my life, and nothing will ever be the same again.

Also, it wasn’t as good as Harry Potter.

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David Elliott is a freelance writer, born in Liverpool in 1981. After discovering that exposure to real life was bringing him out in a rash, he started to apply the soothing cream of fiction, silly fiction, seven times a day, both internally and externally. This led to a worrying addiction, and another rash, for which he is now seeking help. His life is an open book (although not a very good one), and his work has been published by a wide variety of people, places, and things. You can find him desperately trying to make contact with other human beings at @DavidEllioops.