This is an Absolute Write Water Cooler blog chain dedicated to finding the worst ever opening sentence for a novel.
Here’s my entry. It’s from The Mad Vicar of Hartlepool by Dame Evangeline Patch-Albert, OBE.
I could say ‘the body lay in a pool of blood’, but, given the grotesque and unnatural arrangement of its constituent parts, the position of the corpse (if that’s what it was) could hardly be described as lying, nor was the blood pooling—it had long since dried to a black cake—and to call that collection of assorted limbs a body would be to give an impression more than a little short of the literal truth; no, let me start again and say simply, ‘a jumble of parts of what might once have been a body, but could have been several, rested in an untidy pile on a black mat of congealed gore’.
Here’s the complete chain of contributors:
orion_mk3 – http://nonexistentbooks.wordpress.com/
AuburnAssassin – http://clairegillian.com/
dolores haze – http://dianedooley.wordpress.com/
Horseflye – http://thecozylittleplot.blogspot.com/
Proach – http://www.deannaproach.com/
BigWords – http://bigwords88.wordpress.com/
jkellerford – http://jennykellerford.wordpress.com/
xcomplex – http://arielemerald.blogspot.com/
Ralph Pines – http://ralfast.wordpress.com/
Diana Rajchel – http://blog.dianarajchel.com/
pezie – http://www.erinbrambilla.wordpress.com/
Guardian – http://daewrites.blogspot.com/
egoodlett – http://wordlarceny.blogspot.com/
This entry
Alpha Echo – http://writersramblings81.blogspot.com/
Masterfully done! It seems that Lady Patch-Albert has quite the knack for grotesque Edwardian drawing-room mysteries 🙂 Does that mean the butler did it?
Well done, I like how it was sort of like the character’s rambling inner monologue.
Ah, this is particularly relevant to my current reading: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Wonderfully horrible job.
This is absolutely Bulwer-Lytton calibre. Well done!
Haha, love it! So horrific an image. 🙂 “black cake” was a great picture, too… *shudder*
Sadly, I know people who actually talk that way. Well done. Fits perfectly within the spirit of Bulwer-Lytton.