Of all the truly terrible novels in this world, which stinks the worst? There’s no final answer. Great badness is a judgment call.
But when Michael Newton of Hazel Dell envisioned the horrible-est of all horror novels, its opening sentence went like this:
“I looked up at her breathless ‘hello,’ and knew I could never unsee her Bride of Frankenstein makeup, or the way she filled her clothes; which must have looked good form-fitting a younger, svelter her, but now resembled a sausage skin strained to its limits by a failure of the emergency stop on the filling machine; perhaps a developing grub, whose skin failed to molt, or a Michelin Woman, as imagined by Salvador Dali on acid.”
That sentence earned Newton bragging rights — or are they self-shaming rights? — in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, an annual call to launch the worst possible (imaginary) novel with a fittingly awful opening sentence. Prof. Scott Rice of San Jose State University started the contest in 1982, when he was a graduate student “sentenced to write a seminar paper on a minor Victorian novelist,” he writes on his website, www.bulwer-lytton.com.
Close, but no pipe
Michael Newton’s previous, nonwinning entries in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest:
“He knew his karma account was overdrawn, with no replenishment in sight, ‘but a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do’, he thought, as he fell from the roof of the orphanage he was burglarizing, and noticed that his fall would be broken by a police car — that just happened to be there on an unrelated courtesy call.”
“I was drawn to her like a moth to a lightbulb on a summer’s eve — not one of those cold, efficient compact fluorescent bulbs, or an even more efficient dimmable LED, that shines brightly while emitting nearly no heat — but a good old-fashioned 100 watt incandescent, that draws you into increasingly tight spirals, then quick-fries you at the touch of its sizzling-hot orb; my ardor even more intensified by the knowledge that these would soon no longer be available.”
“All through his last night in Hanalei, the rain fell in torrents from the grey sky; echoing off the tin roof of Jackie’s little shack, like green scales falling from the hide of a heartbroken mythical magic dragon.”
His choice was Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1830 novel “Paul Clifford” begins with such moody power, no less a great author than Snoopy the beagle plagiarized it endlessly: “It was a dark and stormy night.”
The contest took on a life of its own (just like the Bride of Frankenstein); Rice retired from teaching, but he still judges the thousands of delightfully terrible entries that pour in every year. Several “Dark and Stormy” anthologies have been published. There’s even an audiobook, so you can hear all those ridiculous openers delivered with proper gravitas by a professional actor.
“I love sarcasm,” said Newton, who swept the Bulwer-Lytton horror category with his lyrical descriptions of strained-sausage fashions and druggy muffler-shop surrealism. Other categories in the contest include historical, Western, crime, romance and even children’s literature.
Newton said he’s entered the contest a handful of times over the past decade (see his other attempts elsewhere on this page), and wondered if this triumph is really just a “mercy win” that gets him off Rice’s back. But the website says that some people enter the open contest thousands of times — so the judge’s opinion of Newton’s badness must be sincere.
This year’s Grand Prize winner is Kat Russo of Loveland, Colo., who wrote:
“The elven city of Lossti faced towering sea cliffs and abutted rolling hills that in the summer were covered with blankets of flowers and in the winter were covered with blankets, because the elves wanted to keep the flowers warm and didn’t know much at all about gardening.”
As we say, badness is a judgment call; we happen to think there’s funnier, awful-er stuff at www.bulwer-lytton.com, where all winners and mentions are posted. And, we proudly note that Vancouver is no newcomer to dark and stormy literary fame; in 2014, local guy Damian Alabakoff earned a dishonorable mention for this mind bender:
“He was waiting for the call seated behind his desk, his right knee bouncing up and down like the piston of a one-cylinder steam engine — the kind old guys restore and stand proudly next to at the county fair hoping someone will stop and ask about it but they never do as the engine thumps and sputters in rhythm like an anxious guy seated behind his desk bouncing his knee up and down.”
Did You Know?
The complete opening sentence to Edward George Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel “Paul Clifford” isn’t just dark and stormy — it’s long-winded, too:
“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”
