There was an entire Batman story written in cliche.
It was a dark and stormy night.
A shot rang out.
Etc. It was pretty funny.
Tris
Count me in the minority, but I think that the opening lines of Paul Clifford are vivid and quite well done.
Maybe readers of post-Hemingway prose are not used to long sentences with a lot of dependent clauses. But they were tyical in 19th-century English prose; read the opening lines of Dickens novels, for heaven’s sake.
In further defense of Bulwer-Lytton, his 1859 story of the occult, “The Haunted and the Haunters,” is still widely reprinted in horror anthologies.
But what about the king?
It is if you want people to buy next month’s installment. Bulwer Lytton wrote, in part, to make money.
Those are very close to the first two lines of Snoopy’s “great novel,” the entire first chapter of which I believe is:
It was a dark and stormy night. Suddenly, a shot rang out. A door slammed. The maid screamed. Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon. While millions of people were starving, the king lived in luxury. Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a girl was growing up.