Mick Hartley

The annual Bulwer-Lytton contest results for 2010 have just been announced (via AL Daily and Metafilter - yes, it's a big deal). The contest, started in 1982, challenges authors "to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels", in homage to the prolific 19th Century author Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, whose 1830 novel Paul Clifford begins with the classic line, "It was a dark and stormy night.".

The reason Bulwer-Lytton's line is amusing is that it was written in earnest. A competition looking at opening lines to novels by authors whose talent is less than their ambition might, equally, come up with some amusing moments - especially if it included unpublished manuscripts. But a competition seeking contributions deliberately intended to be bad? It's a recipe for laboured self-indulgence, surely.

Here's the 2010 winner:

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.

It's a nicely disconcerting and heavy-handed simile, for sure, and could perhaps be the start of an entry for the Bad Sex award (another jokey literary conceit that's past its sell-by date), but that's about all you can say for it. What about this as the runner-up, though?

Through the verdant plains of North Umbria walked Waylon Ogglethorpe and, as he walked, the clouds whispered his name, the birds of the air sang his praises, and the beasts of the fields from smallest to greatest said, "There goes the most noble among men" — in other words, a typical stroll for a schizophrenic ventriloquist with delusions of grandeur.

That is so screamingly unfunny – a black hole of unfunniness – that it sucks all the humour out of everything nearby.

Is that the point? I don't know. Pass.