The Mini Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

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/