2015 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest Winners

[duaneiac]

"Conceived to honor the memory of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton and to encourage unpublished authors who do not have the time to actually write books, the contest challenges entrants to compose bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Bulwer was selected as patron of the competition because he opened his novel "Paul Clifford" (1830) with the immortal words, "It was a dark and stormy night." Lytton’s sentence actually parodied the line and went on to make a real sentence of it, but he originated the line "The pen is mightier than the sword," and the expression "the great unwashed." His best known work is "The Last Day's of Pompeii" (1834), an historical novel that has been adapted for film multiple times."

You should check out the winners here:

http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2015win.html

but to whet your appetite, here are a few runners-up:

I knew that dame was damaged goods when she first sauntered in, and I don't mean lightly scratched and dented goods that a reputable merchant like Home Depot might offer in a clearly marked end display sale; no, she was more like the kind of flashy trashy plastic knockoff that always carries a child-choking hazard that no self-respecting 11-year-old Chinese sweat shop kids would ever call theirs.

 

An evil darkness strode across the forsaken lands of Marmon, casting a shadow like a superhero whose cape’s special power is to turn day into night, that was how the darkness strode (not like the superhero who was otherwise a very nice man).

 

The night was dark; which is a bit redundant, since night is by definition dark, unless it's a stormy night when lightning causes moments of brilliant light, or except in places like Norway or Alaska where summer nights can be pretty light, but still, most of the time when you say “night,” people are going to think “dark.”