2008 Bulwer-Lytton Contest winners: Yes, the writing’s bad

Gloriously bad! But that’s the point of the Bulwer-Lytton Contest — to write the worst possible opening sentence to an imaginary novel.

This year’s grand prize winner, and all the category winners, can be found on the contest’s website. But here are a few of my favorites.

Winner, Children’s Literature:

Joanne watched her fellow passengers – a wizened man reading about alchemy; an oversized bearded man-child; a haunted, bespectacled young man with a scar; and a gaggle of private school children who chatted ceaselessly about Latin and flying around the hockey pitch and the two-faced teacher who they though was a witch – there was a story here, she decided.
– Tim Ellis, Haslemere, UK

Runner-up, Spy Fiction:

The KGB agent known only as the Spider, milk solids oozing from his mouth and nose, surveyed the spreading wound in his abdomen caused by the crushing blow of the low but deadly hassock and begged of his attacker to explain why she had gone to the trouble of feeding him tainted milk products before effecting his assassination with such an inferior object as this ottoman, only to hear in his dying moments an escaping Miss Muffet of the MI-5 whisper, “It is my whey.”
– David Potter, Nagoya, Japan

Runner-up, Adventure:

“Die, commie pigs!” grunted Sergeant “Rocky” Steele through his cigar stub as he machine-gunned the North Korean farm animals.
– Dave Ranson, Calgary, Alberta

That one made me laugh out loud. Not because I support the machine-gunning of farm animals, even NoKo porkers. I just love a cold war pun. Back in college, during the Cold War era (yes, kiddies, I’m that old) I competed in track and field. One day after practice Payton Jordan, retired coach of the Stanford men’s team and former U.S. Olympic coach, walked over to me, looked at my feet, and handed me a pair of shoes. “The Polish coach gave these to me. They look like they’d fit you. Have ‘em.” They were suede spikes, a flaming shade of scarlet, brand name Dag, fresh from some Warsaw Pact factory. They were the craziest shoes I ever put on my feet, and made my toes look pointy, but you can bet I wore them every time I competed. I loved being a capitalist running Dag.