so bad it's brilliant

It Was A Dark And Stormy Night
compiled by Scott Rice

Every year the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest lays a challenge to its entrants: to write the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. Up to 10,000 people enter each year and it seems there is no limit to the sheer awfulness that can be created with a little application. Here for example is the grand winner of this years contest:

Gerald began--but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them "permanently" meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash--to pee.
Jim Gleeson, Madison, WI

Brilliant. This book, bound in beautiful mock leatherette, brings together the best of the worst and is a perfect gift for anyone you know who likes reading.