Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

Gerald began—but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them “permanently” meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash—to pee.

This execrable sentence erupted from the molten mind of Jim Gleeson, the 2007 grand-prize winner of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. And he's not even an English major, but a media technician.

For 25 years, the English Department at San Jose State University has sponsored the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which challenges contestants to write the worst possible first sentence for the worst of all possible novels.

You can read the 2007 winners for all categories on the contest's web site, but we'll leave you with the winner of the Vile Pun category:

I was in a back alley in Fiji, fighting desperately and silently for my life, fighting desperately for oxygen, clawing at the calm and almost gentle pressure of the fabric held over my face by implacable, ebony thighs when I realized -- he was killing me softly with his sarong. (Karl Scott, Brisbane, Australia)