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 that 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.

(quoted from Scott Rice's book, "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night")

Notice, that's just one sentence.

I've never read the novel, but I understand it lives up to the promise in that sentence's style, structure, vocabulary and rambling length.

The novel, and Bulwer-Lytton (whose work you may have inadvertently run across, sort of, via one of the screen adaptations of his "The Last Days of Pompeii"), and his sentence, might never have achieved all of their latter-day fame/infamy but for the inspiration of Scott Rice, professor of English at San Jose State University in California.

In 1982, he started the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, in which entrants inspired by Lord Edward's undying prose strive to write the worst possible opening sentence for a blessedly nonexistent novel. As Rice puts it in the above book, "The contest did not actually encourage bad bad writing, but good bad writing, writing so deliberately rotten that it both entertains and instructs."

One extraordinary thing is that, once he went public with the contest, he got thousands of entries. Another extraordinary thing is that he did this under the actual aegis of the University. There seemed to be people of vision in charge at San Jose State.

You might never suspect it from my serious writing, but I have the kind of mind that instantly sees such a contest as a challenge to my skill and sense of humor. Hearing of the contest, I entered in 1983, and was promptly rewarded -- or branded, or something -- with a minor award of Dishonorable Mention. I went on to further distinction, or disreputation, in other years, culminating in Runner-Up in two categories before the contest seemed to vanish from public view. I even got to read my last Category Runner-Up sentence on local TV news, in an item in which the presenter got that glazed look that seems to go with trying to explain to the viewing public why people do such things.

I can't, because of copyright issues, reproduce here the truly, marvellously awful sentences that actually won top awards in various years (read Rice's books, which I enthusiastically recommend, if you can find them).

However, I still retain general rights to my own sentences, which you may now read. Or, wiser impulses may prevail, and you may not.

That first Dishonorable Mention that hooked me, and which appears on page 10 of "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night":

From the moment she entered, Moira O'Hanlon's tawdry elegance galvanized the Back Bay ballroom, the luminescence of her Galway-green eyes and the heat rising from her voluptuous cleavage drawing the tuxedoed Brahmins like derelicts to a Bronx trash-can fire on a cold Saint Valentine's Eve.

So you're still here. Now for the rest of them. I'll leave you to guess which of them merited -- is that the word? -- my other two Dishonorable Mentions and my first Category Runner-Up. But I will say that the second-last is the one my friends, of whom I can proudly say that none left me because of being induced to read my output, liked the best. And the last is the one I got to read on TV after winning my last category Runner-Up. Talk about 15 minutes of fame. More like 30 seconds. But earned, and not because of any act deemed a criminal offense in Canada. Yet.

I first saw her looking up at the grunge on my office window, standing, with her big breasts and her big picture hat, while around her spotless white shoes the morning's drizzle washed the vomit of the night before down from the mean sidewalks into the sewers I knew, even then, she was never born to inhabit.

---

Marc sobbed bravely as Dr. Lecouteau informed him that his tissue typing test results required the accidental demise, within the next two weeks, of a large male baboon with a healthy pancreas.

---

Between the soft underbelly of Singaporean society and the seething, kris-laden horde stood only the thin scarlet line of Grenadiers, staunch as the ham slices keeping the Hollandaise and egg yolk from soaking into the Eggs Benedict muffins of that society's Sunday brunchers, doomed as the ripping red wrap around yet another new doll outfit for some spiteful, spoiled brat of that same society -- such as Agnes, of whom more anon.

---

"I'm glad you brought the subject up," admitted Melvin to his creation as it noisily regurgitated the nubile and hardly at all digested body of Veronica, his latest, least agile and to some tastes evidently least appetizing testee.

---

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderly again, which was quite odd considering that I was already at Manderley, and that the main theme of my dream concerned a dozen Star Fleet officers cavorting out of uniform on a beach on Alpha Centauri V.

---

Baron Frankenstein looked up from his sewing, smiled benignly across the laboratory at his similarly-engaged creation and protégé, and called, "Yes, yes! -- put on a happy face; tonight will be your first date with the rest of your wife!"

---

The thin drizzle pooled in little puddles on the impervious parking-lot pavement, like the incontinence of the gods running into the rubber sheet of reality.

---

"You have a dirty mouth," she sneered, and I thought to myself, "Sure, but who wouldn't after exhuming himself from a premature grave with the sleeves of his burial suit still sewn to the lapels?"

The sign had said "Valet parking," and so I had deposited Chauncey in exchange for a pasteboard slip; but before this night was out, I would wish to high heaven that I had kept him close at hand.

If not, here is a list of Scott Rice's compilations, some of which should at least still be in libraries somewhere, which might supply inspiration (and certainly can, courtesy of countless contributors, conduce to chuckles, chortles and conceivably cackles):

"It Was a Dark and Stormy Night" (Penguin, 1984)
"Son of 'It Was a Dark and Stormy Night'" (Penguin, 1986)
"Bride of Dark and Stormy" (Penguin, 1988)
"It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: the Final Conflict" (Penguin, 1992)
"Dark and Stormy Rides Again" (Penguin, 1996)

(and alas, as far as I know that was the last ride, the book ominously being the only one in the series to end without instructions on how to enter the contest)