...Bulwer-Lytton time!

There are several excellent entries for this venerable contest celebrating terrible first sentences for imaginary novels, but my favorites are these:

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

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

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

Seriously, every year I think: Thank you, Lord.

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