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Bulwer-Lytton Awards Winner 2009

by | 9th, July 2009

snoopy-awardsTHANKS to Brian Appleyard and Andrew Sullivan for reminding us it’s the annual Bulwer-Lytton awards – “entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels.”

The pick of this year’s winners:

Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest – Winner:

“Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’ east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May,” a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.”

The winner of 2009 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is David McKenzie

Runner-Up

The wind dry-shaved the cracked earth like a dull razor–the double edge kind from the plastic bag that you shouldn’t use more than twice, but you do; but Trevor Earp had to face it as he started the second morning of his hopeless search for Drover, the Irish Wolfhound he had found as a pup near death from a fight with a prairie dog and nursed back to health, stolen by a traveling circus so that the monkey would have something to ride.

Warren Blair
Ashburn, VA

Runner-Up

In a flurry of flame and fur, fangs and wicker, thus ended the world’s first and only hot air baboon ride.

Tony Alfieri
Los Angeles, CA

Winner: Fantasy Fiction

A quest is not to be undertaken lightly–or at all!–pondered Hlothgar, Thrag of the Western Boglands, son of Glothar, nephew of Garthol, known far and wide as Skull Dunker, as he wielded his chesty stallion Hralgoth through the ever-darkening Thlargwood, beyond which, if he survived its horrors and if Hroglath the royal spittle reader spoke true, his destiny awaited–all this though his years numbered but fourteen.

Stuart Greenman
Seattle, WA

Most of the others read too much like popular fiction to be parodies…



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