In high school we used to read the books put together by the Bulwer-Lytton contest organizers, a yearly contest for the worst opening sentence of the worst book never written. Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote innumerable novels, none of which promise well from their first pages. The Last Days of Pompeii begins thus:
“Ho, Diomed, well met! Do you sup with Glaucus tonight?” said a young man of small stature, who wore his tunic in those loose and effeminate folds which proved him a gentleman and a coxcomb.
One of them famously begins, “It was a dark and stormy night,” whence this contest, for exaggerated, overliterate, and otherwise silly prose. The contest continues, I see. Here are the top selected entries for 2009. A few personal favorites:
Darnell knew he was getting hung out to dry when the D.A. made him come clean by airing other people’s dirty laundry; the plea deal was a new wrinkle and there were still issues to iron out, but he hoped it would all come out in the wash – otherwise he had folded like a cheap suit for nothing.
Lynn Lamousin
Baton Rouge, LA
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
She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida – the pink ones, not the white ones – except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn’t wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren’t.
Eric Rice
Sun Prairie, WI
Their relationship hit a bump in the road, not the low, graceful kind of bump, reminiscent of a child’s choo choo train-themed roller coaster, rather the kind of tall, narrow speed-bump that, if a school bus ran over it, would cause even a fat kid to fly up and bang his head on the ceiling.
Michael Reade
Durham, NC
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