It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: The Best (?) from the Bulwer-Lytton Contest

The fourth collection of hilarious selections taken from the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest for the best of bad fiction. The world-famous competition seeks to find the most atrocious opening sentence to a hypothetical lousy novel. Here are entries from the past three years, plus Rice's advice on how to write in the Bulwer-Lytton mode.