When Bad Is Good

This is far from the first time I’ve written on this page about the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which asks contestants to submit the worst (i.e., funniest and most outlandish) opening sentences from never-to-be-finished books. Yet the task never ceases to raise a smile on my face. As Neatorama explains, “The annual contest is named for Victorian novelist Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton, who once began a book with the phrase ‘It was a dark and stormy night …’ and cemented those words as a writing cliché.” 2016 marks the 34th year for this bad-writing challenge, sponsored by the English Department at California’s San Jose State University.

Fifty-five-year-old Tallahassee, Florida, building contractor William “Barry” Brockett has been declared the overall winner of this year’s competition. His submission bears a distinctly hard-boiled air:

Even from the hall, the overpowering stench told me the dingy caramel glow in his office would be from a ten-thousand-cigarette layer of nicotine baked on a naked bulb hanging from a frayed wire in the center of a likely cracked and water-stained ceiling, but I was broke, he was cheap, and I had to find her.

The winner in the Crime/Detective category is Charles Caldwell of Leesville, Louisiana, who sent in this entry:

She walked toward me with her high heels clacking like an out-of-balance ceiling fan set on low, smiling as though about to spit pus from a dental abscess, and I knew right away that she was going to leave me feeling like I had used a wood rasp to cure my hemorrhoids.

But I am also rather fond of Akron, Ohio, resident Andrew Caruso’s “Dishonorable Mention” recipient in that same category:

As he gazed at Ming’s lifeless body draped over the sushi bar, chopsticks protruding from his back, Det. Herc Lue Perrot came to the sobering realization that tonight, there had been a murder at the Orient Express.

And I got an especially big chuckle out of the winner in the Purple Prose category, which comes from Rachel Nirenberg of Toronto, Canada:

She was like my ex-girlfriend Ashley, who'd stolen my car, broken my heart, murdered my father, robbed a bank, and set off a pipe bomb in Central Park—tall.

Click here to enjoy all of this year’s winners and runners-up.