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Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, an English novelist and poet of the mid-1800s, is famous for his especially florid prose.

To be fair, the ornate literary style was in vogue in Bulwer-Lytton’s day. But he is the lucky fellow who today epitomizes prose of a particularly purple nature.

B.L. is the man who wrote the famous words, “It was a dark and stormy night” to open his 1830 novel, Paul Clifford.

Actually, those words are only the first phrase of the opening sentence, which is eye-popping for its melodramatic ostentatiousness…

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 which 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.

Ya gotta love it.

Since 1982, San Jose State College has sponsored the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest in which entrants are challenged to submit a single, terrible opening sentence to an imaginary novel.

The 2009 winners were just announced, and they are delightfully awful. Here are the worst of the worst:

Grand Prize 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.

David McKenzie
Federal Way, WA

Runner-Up

The wind dry-shaved the cracked earth like a dull razor — the double-edged 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

Grand Panjandrum’s Special Award

Fleur looked down her nose at Guilliame, something she was accomplished at, being six foot three in her stocking feet, and having one of those long French noses — not pert like Bridget Bardot’s, but more like the one that Charles De Gaulle had when he was still alive and President of France and he wore that cap that was shaped like a little hatbox with a bill in the front to offset his nose, but it didn’t work.

Marguerite Ahl
Prescott Valley, AZ

Winner, Detective Stories

She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida — the pink ones, not the white ones — except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn’t wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren’t.

Eric Rice
Sun Prairie, WI

Dishonorable Mention, Detective Stories

The appearance of a thin red beam of light under my office door and the sound of one, then two pair of feet meant my demise was near, that my journey from gum-shoe detective to international agent had gone horribly wrong, until I realized it was my secretary teasing her cat with a laser pointer.

Steve Lynch
San Marcos, 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

Winner, Purple Prose

The gutters of Manhattan teemed with the brackish slurry indicative of a significant, though not incapacitating snowstorm three days prior, making it seem that God had tripped over Hoboken and spilled his smog-flavored Slurpie all over the damn place.

Eric Stoveken
Allentown, PA

Runner-Up, Purple Prose

Warily — as if his hands were a green-bean casserole in a non-tempered glass dish that had just come out of the freezer, and the patient was an oven that had been preheating for a good 75 minutes at 450F — the surgeon slowly reached into the incision and groped for the bullet fragment in the pancreas, at last finding it nestled near one of the Islets of Langerhans like a small wrecked lifeboat foundered on a sandbar as it floated in the fog, adrift in the Sea of John’s Innards.

Christin Keck
Akron OH

Dishonorable Mention, Purple Prose

Their relationship hit a bump in the road — not the low, graceful kind of bump, reminiscent of a child’s choo choo train-themed roller coaster, but rather the kind of tall, narrow speed-bump that, if a school bus ran over it, would cause even a fat kid to fly up and bang his head on the ceiling.

Michael Reade
Durham, NC

Winner, Romance

Melinda woke up suddenly to the sound of her trailer being pounded with wind and hail, and she couldn’t help thinking that if she had only put her prize hog up for adoption last May, none of this would be happening, no one would have gotten hurt, and she wouldn’t be left with only nine toes, or be living in a mobile home park in Nebraska with a second-rate trapeze artist named Fred.

Ada Marie Finkel
Boston, MA

Miscellaneous Dishonorable Mentions

As Laurel made her way through the plaza, she couldn’t help but notice the gorgeous co-anchor for the morning news show, out yet again signing autographs, smiling broadly, and infusing everyone around her with happiness, and she wondered, just for a second, mind you, how good it would feel to punch her right in her stupid little face.

Nikkia Daniel
Marietta, GA

Peter shaded his eyes from the brilliant April morning sunlight as it suddenly illuminated the Bunny Trail, contemplated his handiwork (separating all of those pearly white chicks-to-be from their mothers) and prepared for the final task to complete his mission — yes, this was a good day to dye.

Trent Bristol
Mandan, ND

There were earthquakes in this land, terrible tsunamis that swirled flooding torrents of water throughout, and constant near-blizzard conditions, and not for the first time, Horatio Jones wished he did not live inside a snow globe.

Rich Buley-Neumar
Amityville, NY

Before she was Tabloid Sally, the impossibly foxy movie star who destroyed marriages like a busty ball-peen hammer, before she was Nobel Sally, the mercurial chemist who cured chronic halitosis, and before she was Pulitzer Sally, the honey-dipped scribe who brought Washington to its knees, she was just little Sally Barnes from Crow’s Neck, Nebraska, Bill and Margie’s daughter, a doe-eyed pixie who loved fairy tales and onion rings.

Roger Collier
Ottawa, Ontario

And finally this: Bulwer-Lytton’s famous opening sentence as delivered by Yoda, the Jedi master…

A dark and stormy night it was; in torrents fell the rain — except at occasional intervals, when, by a violent gust of wind was it checked, as up the streets it swept, (for in London it is that lies our scene), along the housetops rattling, and the scanty flame of the lamps fiercely agitating, that against the darkness struggled.

Jay Clifton
Berkeley, CA

Who says Western Civilization is on the decline?

Portrait of Bulwer-Lytton by Henry William Pickersgill.