The Worst (Fake) Opening Lines

After having written about the best opening lines in literature and in SFF, the mind naturally turns to thinking about the worst opening lines. I have no list of these to share, and instead have the following.

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest was conceived "to encourage unpublished authors who do not have the time to actually write books, the contest challenges entrants to compose bad opening sentences to imaginary novels" and was named for Bulwer because he opened his novel "Paul Clifford" (1830) with the immortal words, "It was a dark and stormy night."

The 2015 winners of the award have been posted on the Contest website.

The overall winner was Joel Phillips of West Trenton, New Jersey, for this gem:

Seeing how the victim's body, or what remained of it, was wedged between the grill of the Peterbilt 389 and the bumper of the 2008 Cadillac Escalade EXT, officer "Dirk" Dirksen wondered why reporters always used the phrase "sandwiched" to describe such a scene since there was nothing appetizing about it, but still, he thought, they might have a point because some of this would probably end up on the front of his shirt.

The winner in the fantasy category was David S Nelson of Falls Church, VA for

The three Black Forest Elves, Twinklemann, Sparklemann, and Von Dazzleberg, were sitting at their merry campfire, frying their wursts and hamhocks, slathering their rich black bread with the grease, drinking the icy magical Rhine-water, and one of them at least puffing away on a pudgy little elven-pipe, when who should show up but the OTHER famous elves Oberon, Titania, Galadriel, Elrond, Tinkerbell, the Munchkin lollipop dude, and that thing on the airplane wing in “Twilight Zone.”

The winner in the science fiction category was John Holmes of St. Petersburg, FL for:

The gravitational pull up here on Mars is much less than it is back at home base, of course, so your tongue sticks to the roof of our mouth and everyone sounds like Eleanor Roosevelt.

They are all pretty good, but my personal favorites were the runner up in the Science Fiction category:

Entering the Forbidden Zone on Planet Q38 Minor meant death, either quickly by mushroom poisoning or terribly by The Shiny Golden Hook; but Captain Zirek didn't care, he was in love with three-legged Zora, and that's where she was stabled. — David S Nelson, Falls Church VA

and the winner of the purple prose category:

Carlos stared in lust and amazement as she walked away, her spandex-covered body giving the impression of two well-oiled sumo wrestlers on stilts furiously going for the win. — Marlin Back, Columbus, IN

There is plenty more at the contest website.