Lucy Vickery presents the latest competition
In Competition No. 2587 you were invited to submit an opening to an imaginary novel so magnificently bad that it would repel any would-be reader.
This is an unashamed rip-off of the hugely popular annual Bulwer-Lytton contest, which honours the memory of the 19th-century writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton, whose novel Paul Clifford features the immortal and much-parodied opening: ‘It was a dark and stormy night…’
To parody bad writing successfully takes great skill and I hope that this assignment was as enjoyable to grapple with as it was to judge. The postbag was humming with overwrought prose of inspired awfulness: subject-matter ranged from the spirit-sappingly mundane to the downright repulsive; sentences were convoluted, tautological and cliché-ridden.
Dishonourable mentions to Nicholas Hodgson, Alanna Blake, Brian Murdoch, Michael Swan, R.S. Gwynn, John Phillips, Josh Ekroy, Peter Smalley and Jim Hayes.
The winners below get £25 each. The extra five pounds goes to Bill Greenwell.
If Mandrake Roote had known, all contrarious asseverations aside, that the Thane of Quodd Magna would masticate the left lung of the stripling sacrifice, Tarka Twee, until the poisonous drool ran down his piebald chin, then he (Mandrake) might never have flaunted the regulations so brazenly, nor set in semi-perpetual motion the quest for Ultimate Injustice which I will, from my dung-infested eyrie in The Elm Forest, relate to you, O my eager listeners, with all my phlegm, sparing no scruples, thus to remorselessly document how Mandrake Julius im-Krakat Roote, the offspring of Zeugmana and Flann The Morbid, once the poetaster of KD-57436, reduced the 19 galaxies of RBS Control to a baleful bedlam of savagery and solipsism, and caused an outbreak of auto-mutilation which threatened the very future of Ex-Istence.
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