Bulwer-Lytton Winners 2020

Bulwer-Lytton Winners 2020

Since 1982 the English Department at San Jose State University has sponsored the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, a whimsical literary competition that challenges entrants to compose opening sentences to the worst of all possible novels.

The contest (hereafter referred to as the BLFC) was the misbegotten brainchild of Professor Scott Rice, whose graduate school excavations unearthed what he took to be the source of the line “It was a dark and stormy night.” Sentenced...