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2024 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest Winners

A whimsical literary competition for the worst possible opening sentences to novels never written.

It had seemed a good idea at the time, the first night of my two-week all-inclusive vacation, spent with an affable stranger in a tapas bar oiled by an excess of Corona Extra and tequila shots, but now, in fancy dress holding a red cape, under a pitiless noonday sun, while 1000 pounds of snorting horned beefsteak eyed me malevolently, hoofing a hole in the dirt, the packed spectators oléing for all their worth, I, a junior sales rep in kitchen utensils from Milwaukee, wasn’t so sure. João Diogo Tiogo Pereira decided to walk down the cobblestone streets and past the azulejo-clad building façades to finally ask out the lovely Sara Catarina Custodio da Silva for coffees and pasteis de natas down at the local pasteleria, or maybe vinho do porto in a taberna swelling with fado music, with schist stone walls steeped in centuries of saudad . Even a lone ranger has to adapt to changing times, so with unemployment running below two percent, when Tonto announced that he was finally quitting the pro bono law enforcement game to get his real estate license, the closest an aging John Reid had been able to come to replacing his trusty Indian companion was Ganesh Sarvapindi, a fair shot and a so-so horseman with the annoying habit of referring to his new boss as “kemo sahib.”

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