The 2022 Prize Winners of the Worst Opening Sentences to Novels

For 40 years, the Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest has invited people to come up with the worst possible opening sentences to really bad novels. From the results of the 2022 contest, here’s this year’s grand prize winner:

I knew she was trouble the second she walked into my 24-hour deli, laundromat, and detective agency, and after dropping a load of unmentionables in one of the heavy-duty machines (a mistake that would soon turn deadly) she turned to me, asking for two things: find her missing husband and make her a salami on rye with spicy mustard, breaking into tears when I told her I couldn’t help — I was fresh out of salami.

I am also fond, for some reason, of this one:

Apart from his undergraduate degree in art history and several years under the tutelage of Simone d’Poisson, preeminent Monet scholar at the Louvre, truckin’ was all Billy knew.

The name of the contest is in honor of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, a British writer and politician who was active in the mid-19th century. He’s typically roasted for having the worst opening line in an actual novel: “It was a dark and stormy night.” But Bulwer-Lytton also came up with several pithy and memorable turns of phrase, like “the pen is mightier than the sword”.

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