The 2001 Lyttle Lytton Contest#
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The 2001 Winners
Turning, I mentally digested all of what you, the reader, are about to find out heartbreakingly.
The cosmonauts were transfixed with wonderment as the sun set—over the Earth—there lucklessly, untethered Comrade Todd on fire.
Jonathan Thomson
Mary (who dies at the end, so don’t get all surprised like the stupid person who wrote me on my other book) loved Joe, a lot.
Nathan Eady
This would be slightly improved by changing “on” to “about”, but is otherwise great. The fact that you can take out the hilarious parenthetical aside and still get a strong contender for this contest makes this one doubly impressive. In a similar vein but taking the “hey this is a book” theme in a slightly different direction is this:
If you’re going to start reading my novel, please stop touching yourself like that.
Nick Montfort
Monica had exploded, and I had a mystery, and pieces of her pancreas, on my hands.
Bruce Otter
The pairing of “mystery” and “pancreas” isn’t bad, but the matter-of-fact “Monica had exploded, and…” is what really sells this one. Then there’s this:
The moon was full, the hot-dog-eating contest was over, and I had a lot of throwing up to do.
Gary Thorn
And this:
A lone testicle lay in a barren field.
Jon Tando
“Handful of Meat” was, unfortunately, more than just the name of Carl’s band.
Randy Patton
Jeremy didn’t remember eating corn or, for that matter, wearing his good loafers.
Michael Wells
And getting even more surreal:
Leon fell out of the goat.
Rob Tobias
Some entries I almost discarded because, even though they were quite striking, I could see them as audacious beginnings to good comedic novels:
First, let me give you some background on the whole monkey thing.
anonymous
“Man, you won’t believe what happened to me tonight,” Dave declared, bursting into our dorm room, “but first I gotta go beat off!”
Jonathan Boggess
And in a Douglas Adams-y mood:
The night passed like a kidney stone: painfully and with the help of major sedatives.
Tony Delgado
I can also see this as the beginning of a Forrest Gump sort of thing:
Before I got hit by that ole bus, I never used to think much, but now I think PLENTY.
Mark Silcox
The entry that would fit most comfortably in the big Bulwer-Lytton contest, not just because of its length but also its content, was this one:
Done with slaughtering nuns and the infirmed out of cyber-lust, Mandroid turned his optical probes towards a more pastoral (and spiritually recondite) existence.
Dennis Slade
Here's one that's sort of a one-trick pony but which I still like—in this case, the one trick is the old “unnecessary clarification” gag:
In anticipation, John licked his own lips.
Andrew Lloyd
This one gets in less because of its wince-worthy metaphor than its promise of a truly awful novel to come:
Hank, Herculean therapist, cleansed the Augean stables of my soul.
Peter Berman
400 pages lovingly detailing Hank’s gentle yet masculine counseling… urgh. Another book which I would most definitely not want to read begins thusly:
To stand tall, to humbly crawl; to laugh, to cry; to puke bitterly, to suck on come what may—here follows my turbulent infancy.
Jason Melancon
Six o’clock comes early, and so does death.
author unknown
And, lastly:
In 3010, the potatoes triumphed.
Nat Gertler
Indeed they did, friend. Indeed they did.
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