Best Worst First Lines

Have you ever wondered where Snoopy got his opening line for all his books?  "It was a dark and stormy night..."

Well it was actually from a novel called ​Paul Clifford  by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and it is said to have one of the worst opening lines ever. The opening line was so bad that they even made a contest to see the best worst first lines people could write and named it after him.  The contest is called the Bulwer-Lytton contest and here a link to 2016's contest.  The winner was William "Barry" Brockett and this was his winning entry:

Even from the hall, the overpowering stench told me the dingy caramel glow in his office would be from a ten-thousand-cigarette layer of nicotine baked on a naked bulb hanging from a frayed wire in the center of a likely cracked and water-stained ceiling, but I was broke, he was cheap, and I had to find her.

Would you read that book?

Check out the link for more terrible opening lines. 

​By Peter Christensen