The winners of the 2024 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Awards have just been announced, and many of them (and the (dis)honourable mentions and runners-up) are pretty good.
Founded in 1982 at San Jose State University in California, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest challenges entrants to compose opening sentences to the worst of all possible novels.
As someone once said: “Deliberately bad writing requires a special talent.”
It’s true. But interestingly, I have no special talent at all.
All the stuff on this blog is entirely accidental. Just variable fortune and the occasional evening filled with Castle Milk Stout with which to distractedly guide my typing fingers.
Anyway, back to the BLFA, and, as you might expect for the highest (only?) awards for this particular genre, they’re bad.
You’ll need to have your brain fired up and be in the right mood (receptive and ready to work through some mental calculations) to enjoy the lot of them before you click that link, so I recommend taking it a bit at a time.
They’re not going anywhere.
And I could list them all here, but I’m not going to. Still, here are a couple of favourites to get you in the mood.
Cthulhu awoke from loathsome dreams of gangrenous decay and the foul stench of congealing viscera, lifting his pulpy, misshapen head to find what foolish supplicant had roused him to yet another age of fear and creeping dread, but found his bloodthirst unslaked, having been brought to consciousness not by horror-filled screams of human sacrifice but by his little sister’s overly dramatic wail of “Cthulhu’s touching me!” from her side of the family station wagon’s back seat.
If broken hearts were made of simple syrup, and shattered dreams were made from white rum, and agony and despair came from ¾ ounce of lime juice, freshly squeezed, and three mint leaves respectively, then Mary Lou just served up a mojito cocktail straight from the ninth circle of hell when she told Ricky the baby wasn’t his.
And these weren’t even their best in class. So click through and enjoy.