So bad, but oh so good.
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- July
- 6
They’re here. The 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest results — where writers all over compete to compose the worst first line for a novel — are in.
This is one of my highlights of the year. (Yes, I’m that much of a geek.)
It’s not just one winner. There are tons, in categories like detective fiction, fantasy and so on. The winners are followed by “dishonorable mentions.”
Want a taste? Here’s the winner in the “Purple Prose” category:
“The gutters of Manhattan teemed with the brackish slurry indicative of a significant though not incapacitating snowstorm three days prior, making it seem that God had tripped over Hoboken and spilled his smog-flavored slurpie all over the damn place.”
Eric Stoveken
Allentown, PA
Go, Allentown.
Thirsty for more? Click here.
The contest, sponsored by the English department at San Jose State University, is named for Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, the writer who authored the opening phrase, “It was a dark and stormy night.”
Actually, the full first sentence is a lot cheesier than that. It’s from Bulwer-Lytton’s novel “Paul Clifford,” and it goes like this:
“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”
So there it is. But before you go enjoy the list, I have one quick question. There is another novel, much more famous than “Paul Clifford,” that begins with “It was a dark and stormy night.”
Can you name it?
This entry was posted
on Monday, July 6th, 2009 at 1:50 pm by Ken Valenti.
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Ooh! Ooh! Pick me! I’ve been a reader geek since childhood and still own my copy of Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time”. Of course, those were the days when I preferred to read on the roof of my beagle’s dog house. Until one fateful night when, suddenly, a shot rang out…