The Worst Prose of the Year.

The results of San Jose State University’s 2007 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest are in. Jim Gleason of Wisconsin beat out thousands of entrants for the honor of having written the worst opening sentence for a novel. Here’s his entry:

Gerald began–but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them “permanently” meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash–to pee.

The runners-up and the winners in various subcategories are also amazingly convoluted. The contest has been held every year since 1982, and was named in honor of notoriously bad writer Edward George Bulwer-Lytton. Link