The singer scored a huge hit with his 2013 memoir, Autobiography, but has failed to impress with his first work of fiction, List of the Lost.

The book is about a 1970s sports team in Boston, Massachusettes which is cursed by a demon.

A review by Alex Clark of British newspaper The Guardian condemns the book as "utter garbage".

He adds, "(It is) verbose, tangential, unfocused... linguistically imprecise... bewilderingly all over the shop... with no clear plot or, indeed, point... Some sentences are pure gibberish."

Fellow Guardian critic Michael Hann writes, "Do not read this book... All those who shepherded it to print should hang their heads in shame... It is an unpolished turd of a book, the stale excrement of Morrissey's imagination... All you need to know is not to buy it. Please don't encourage Morrissey to write any more novels."

Nico Hines of Thedailybeast.com writes, "Around the simple story of a dazzling but doomed track relay team... (He) has hung dozens of divergent mini-rants touching on the pet hates that have been grinding his gears since the 1980s, including the royal family, the meat industry, and Margaret Thatcher... It's more of a novella than a fully fledged novel, clocking in at fewer than 120 pages, and that's just as well, since Morrissey's meandering ramble is unbroken by chapters or any obvious structure... The writing is laughably clunky; the characters are thinly drawn... None of these issues are the most glaring problem with List of the Lost, however. That accolade goes to the extraordinary tone of misogyny that pervades the entire story."

Novelist Lucy Inglis reviewed the book in a live tweeting session, during which she declared, "To say this is terrible is like saying sitting in a dismal room waiting for a diagnosis of terminal illness is terrible..."

She concluded her review by stating, "Oh. That was the last line. Thank f**k it's over. Without doubt that was one of the worst things I've ever read."

Morrissey became a trending topic on Twitter.com on Thursday as fans dissected the book.