Since 1982 the English Department at San Jose State University has sponsored the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. The contest is named after the Victorian novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, whose line “It was a dark and stormy night . . . ” was made famous by the novelist-beagle Snoopy in the cartoon Peanuts.
This year’s winner, Molly Ringle of Seattle, WA, beat out the competition with this cringe-inducing entry:
For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss—a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.
That’s bad, but I think we can do worse. Add your entry for the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels in the comments section.
June 30th, 2010 | 9:43 am
I don’t know: that’s pretty darn good. Or bad. Whatever.
June 30th, 2010 | 10:06 am
My friend Brian “George” Fleming entered this in the contest but got not mention:
“As the day’s heartbeat slowed to the sonambulant state of a small, beady-eyed gerbil, George, too, grew tired and contentedly climbed his own flight of stairs like so many plastic tubes, thinking tomorrow would merely be filled with the same toilet paper roll gnawing every day brought, and not the cage-cleaning catacylsm that actually awaited him.”
Oddly enough, both he and the winner had gerbils and gerbil cages on the mind.
June 30th, 2010 | 10:46 am
If its in a PG Wodehouse or Evelyn Waugh novel (ok, not Waugh) I’d say its great. If its in serious fiction, I’d say its overwrought.
June 30th, 2010 | 11:22 am
Like a swift knee to the crotch, rosy-fingered Dawn broke Morpheus’s headlock, pitching libation-sodden Odysseus onto the plain of holy Ilium, which, swaying like the wine-dark sea, gave new meaning to the sobriquet ‘deep-revolving’ and lead him to pray that dark death would soon veil his eyes.
Or something like that.
June 30th, 2010 | 11:50 am
Oh no,no,no, let’s not play — add new terrible sentences. Let’s play Editor and gussy this one up:
For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at stolen rendezvous in the trendy Hotel Lucia with a kiss—a lengthy, devouring kiss, Ricardo, clenching the hotel’s treat box, in between yips of pleasure, lapping at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a Toto Neaorest 600 toilet complete with power catalytic air purifier function and he were the world’s thirstiest, ill-trained, sex-crazed poodle.
June 30th, 2010 | 12:19 pm
It’s a great idea, but there doesn’t seem to be an entry that really just relies on word power so much as SNL-stylized grossout or weirdness, “crotch,” “nostril,” “Gerbil,” “sweat.” They remind me of bad movie trailers instead of bad novels. This came closest:
The wind whispering through the pine trees and the sun reflecting off the surface of Lake Tahoe like a scattering of diamonds was an idyllic setting, while to the south the same sun struggled to penetrate a sky choked with farm dust and car exhaust over Bakersfield, a town spread over the lower San Joaquin Valley like a brown stain on a wino’s trousers, which is where, unfortunately, this story takes place.
June 30th, 2010 | 1:17 pm
Maybe we should pause here to recall the deathless prose of the master himself. Here’s how Bulwer-Lytton opens his novel Rienzi:
“The celebrated name which forms the title to this work will sufficiently apprise the reader that it is in the earlier half of the fourteenth century that my story opens.
“It was on a summer evening that two youths might be seen walking beside the banks of the Tiber, not far from that part of its winding course which sweeps by the base of Mount Aventine. The path they had selected was remote and tranquil. It was only at a distance that were seen the scattered and squalid houses that bordered the river, from amidst which rose, dark and frequent, the high roof and enormous towers which marked the fortified mansion of some Roman baron. On one side of the river, behind the cottages of the fishermen, soared Mount Janiculum, dark with massive foliage, from which gleamed at frequent intervals, the grey walls of many a castellated palace, and the spires and columns of a hundred churches; on the other side, the deserted Aventine rose abrupt and steep, covered with thick brushwood; while, on the height, from concealed but numerous convents, rolled, not unmusically, along the quiet landscape and the rippling waves, the sound of the holy bell.”
The story goes on from there for another 500 pages or so.
June 30th, 2010 | 1:30 pm
“A trenchcoat of an indeterminate brown color, behind which might easily have been concealed a Panzer tank, swept into the hotel lobby, mounted by a head of equally indeterminate brown hair and an acne-scarred face which, one immediately saw, was incapable of concealing anything, least of all its bearer’s insecurity (a fact which largely explained the trenchcoat).”
June 30th, 2010 | 6:48 pm
God help me, but I would continue reading Tracy’s novel.
June 30th, 2010 | 11:06 pm
John: fortunately for you, that’s as far as I can get before something resembling plot becomes necessary, and I’m helpless to go further.
July 1st, 2010 | 12:46 am
After a month on the road Alfred Morgansen was certain the best and worst thing about being a travelling emetic salesman was giving out free samples.
July 2nd, 2010 | 10:42 am
And then there’s the Lyttle Lytton Contest
July 15th, 2010 | 2:44 pm
“When Keith thought of Dawn and her stunning flaxen hair and aquamarine eyes, he was reminded of the sunrise–it was a pity, then, that she was a denizen of the night.”
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