The Best of the Worst

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is named after Edward Bulwer-Lytton who wrote the opening line "It was a dark and stormy night...." (Turns out he also gave us the phrases "the pen is mightier than the sword," and "the almighty dollar" but he is remembered for a lousy opening line. Talk about no respect.) The idea behind the contest is to intentionally create the worst opening lines possible. The 2009 winners have been announced and there are some doozies. Some of my favorite results...

The runner up:

The wind dry-shaved the cracked earth like a dull razor--the double edge kind from the plastic bag that you shouldn't use more than twice, but you do; but Trevor Earp had to face it as he started the second morning of his hopeless search for Drover, the Irish Wolfhound he had found as a pup near death from a fight with a prairie dog and nursed back to health, stolen by a traveling circus so that the monkey would have something to ride.

The winner for the detective category:

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.

And 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.

New classics all.