A Dark and Stormy Ending

It didn’t receive much attention — what with the Tangerine Toddler (aka Cheeto Benito) and his league of sycophantic vassals plunging America into fascism and all — but one of the sadder events of the year was the demise of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

You might remember it. Founded in 1983 by English professor Scott Rice at California’s San Jose State University, the annual event challenged entrants to compose the opening line for the worst possible novel they could imagine.

Like Charles M. Schulz’s beloved Snoopy of the Peanuts comic strip fame, Rice drew his inspiration from the monumentally bad beginning to Victorian baron Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford: It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

I don’t suppose anyone ever entered this contest for the money. The 2008 winner received $250. The booty had dwindled to “about $150” by 2014. In 2023, according to the official rules, the grand prize was “a cheap certificate and bragging rights.”

Ah, but to a certain kind of mind, the bragging rights — and the sheer joy of composition — were the only rewards that mattered.

After attracting just three entries in the first year, the contest garnered extensive media attention in the second. In 1984, about 10,000 awful openers to potential worst novels of all time were submitted by bookish wags and puckish word nerds. No mean feat in a pre-internet era.

As the popularity continued to mount (going viral in those days was not a consummation devoutly to be wished), Rice (with help later on from his daughter, EJ, and their “panel of undistinguished judges”) wound up expanding the fab farce into such subcategories as detective fiction, romance novels, Western novels and purple prose.

Time and tide wait for no one, of course. Someone wrote that somewhere. So in a short announcement this July, Rice regretfully wrapped up Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest after 42 years of receiving abominable sentences from all over the globe: “Being a year and a half older than Joseph Biden, I find the BLFC becoming increasingly burdensome and would like to put myself out to pasture while I still have some vim and vigour.” Just to give you a flavour of the sorts of dramatic vim and vigour submitted over the years, here are some beauties: 2011 Grand Prize Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories. Sue Fondrie, Oshkosh, Wisconsin

2015 Grand Prize 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. Joel Phillips, West Trenton, New Jersey 2022 Grand Prize I knew she was trouble the second she walked into my 24-hour deli, laundromat, and detective agency, and after dropping a load of unmentionables in one of the heavy-duty machines (a mistake that would soon turn deadly) she turned to me, asking for two things: find her missing husband and make her a salami on rye with spicy mustard, breaking into tears when I told her I couldn’t help — I was fresh out of salami. John Farmer, Aurora, Colorado

To quote the eminently quotable Harry Dunne from the movie Dumb and Dumber: “That was genius, Lloyd, sheer genius.” (And if I know Mary as well as I think I do, she’ll invite us right in for tea and strumpets.) All of this got me thinking, with only a twinge of conscience, about how Bulwer-Lyttonish  mutations of five well-known literary overtures from the Western canon might read. After all, there is no more sacred moment in the life of the reader — save, perhaps, the quiet ecstasy of discovering a hidden chocolate chip at the bottom of a supposedly “raisin” cookie — than the first sentence of a novel. That breathless entry into a new world, that promise of narrative flight, that tacit agreement that yes, we will follow you, unnamed narrator, wherever you may go, even if it’s a whaling ship or a collapsing marriage or some kind of bureaucratic nightmare involving Germanic nouns and suicidal metaphors.

Fasten your feather quills and inkwells, everyone. It’s going to be a (dark and) bumpy night!

1. Melville’s Minimalism

Original: “Call me Ishmael.”

This line is practically a mic drop. Three words, one identity, a whole novel wrapped in mystery and salt spray. It’s as if Hemingway gave birth to a comma and named it after the Old Testament.

Bulwer-Lytton version: Though christened Bartholomew-Jonathan-Ezekiel Q. Featherstone III by a mother who fancied Victorian gravitas and a father who fancied rum, I insisted — against the objections of the parish council and several confused taxidermists — that all should call me Ishmael, partly because it sounded vaguely prophetic, partly because it so annoyed my cousin Larry.

2. Dickens’s Binary Bombast

Original: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times ...”

Dickens was many things: verbose, sentimental, a lousy husband suspiciously fond of orphans — but he knew how to hook you. This line pops because it’s both poetic and sneakily accurate, like being told your haircut is “unexpected.”

Bulwer-Lytton version: It was the best of times in the sense that the bread wasn’t mouldy and most limbs remained unsevered, but also the worst of times if you consider the pestilence, the plummeting pigeon populations and the general tendency of aristocrats to explode into gibbering fits of poetic injustice.

3. The Cosmic Bang of Genesis (pre-Phil Collins)

Original: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”

This sentence contains all of cosmology, metaphysics and divine authorship in twelve words. No pressure.

Bulwer-Lytton version: In the beginning — which was not so much a specific point as a metaphysical suggestion bracketed by primordial noodling — God, after procrastinating for six eternities and rejecting several blueprints involving sentient moss (“sentient moss” being a possible title for the next Pixar movie), finally created the heaven and the earth, mostly to stop the angels from asking “Are we there yet?”

4. Tolstoy’s Domestic Terrorism

Original: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Simple. Clinical. Devastating. Like a scalpel dipped in vodka.

Bulwer-Lytton version: All happy families resemble each other with the eerie uniformity of mannequins in a suburban department store, while each unhappy family is a baroque tureen of passive-aggression, deflated Halloween lawn inflatables, unspoken grudges about the Christmas of ’93 and at least one previously unknown incestuous incident from the 19th century suddenly laid bare for the neighbours to read on ancestry.ca.

5. From Kafkaesque to Polkaesque

Original: “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.”

Kafka gives us the quiet horror of being punished for something you didn’t do. Or did do. Or might have done but were never told about. It’s like trying to return a blender to IKEA.

Bulwer-Lytton version: Someone — perhaps a vengeful aunt, a bitter pastry chef or that mime he insulted at the office party — must have slandered Josef K., for one morning he awoke to find himself arrested by men in strangely tight lederhosen who refused to explain anything but insisted on humming ominous polka tunes.

Oh. And in a closing-opening allusion you might or might not grok, I should mention that like the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest itself, Mother died today — or possibly yesterday, or perhaps she’s merely napping with particularly poor circulation — but in any case the parakeet is inconsolable and the casseroles have begun to arrive with unnerving punctuality.