Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest 2008 results

[Love_Rhombus]

If I have been scooped, forgive me.
These are pretty hilarious. But also impressive.

[photopat]

Aw, nuts. I didn’t even get a dishonorable mention. I guess I just don’t write badly enough.

[Walloon]

Why pick on Bulwer-Lytton? I thought his often-anthologized horror story The Haunted and the Haunters was terrific. Lovecraft before its time.

[Rico]

Now this made me snerk out loud:

Leopold looked up at the arrow piercing the skin of the dirigible with a sort of wondrous dismay – the wheezy shriek was just the sort of sound he always imagined a baby moose being beaten with a pair of accordions might make.

[Rick]

Actually I liked the runner up

“Die, commie pigs!” grunted Sergeant “Rocky” Steele through his cigar stub as he machine-gunned the North Korean farm animals.

[elfkin477]

So, are Rick and Rico playing with us by citing those two right off the bat?

[Princhester]

There are many entries that work by following the wordy-buildup-then-sudden-non-sequitur model, but most are so overplayed that they read not like very bad sentences but like calculated Bulwer-Lytton contest entries. But I love this one:

Town mayor Alvaredo Sanchez, in defense of Carmelita’s indubitable honor, cracked the very expensive ocean-mist smoky-blue bottle of worm-in-bottom tequila over the badly balding head of his political opponent senior Montaya Gonzales, who runs the Toyota factory in town.

The final non sequitur is just so beautifully underplayed that even after reading it three times I still go “Bwuh?” at the end.

[Chefguy]

This one made my day:

Watching Felicia walk into the bar was like watching two fat Rottweilers in yellow spandex and spike heels that had treed a scrawny bleach blond cat at the top of a skinny flagpole that for some reason had decided to sprout casaba melons.

[Helena]

My friend who went to Evergreen liked this one:

Like almost every other post-Hegelian neo-hipster angst monkey at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Rene flatly rejected the labels society placed upon him.

[Amp]

This was one made me laugh out loud:

She had the kind of body that made a man want to have sex with her.

[vison]

Thank you!!! I was feeling sorta low and depressed and now I am cheered up and looking forward to a good day.

Good stuff. Great stuff. Really awful.