It was a dark and stormy night...

Since 1982, the English Department of San Jose State University holds the Bulwar-Lytton Fiction Contest, where contestants submit a one-line opening to arguably the worst book in English literature, Paul Clifford (1830). Lord Bulwar-Litton was the writer of one of my favorite books of all time, Last Days of Pompeii, about a blind slave, Nadia, who falls in love with Glauco, a Greek stud, and conspires to win his heart, right before the volcanic eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.

But back to Paul Clifford. Lord Lytton opened the book with this sentence.

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents—except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops,
and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the
darkness.

And the competition is for writers to submit their own opening line for the book, in one sentence. Some of the winning entries are just too hilarious, for example:

The moment he laid eyes on the lifeless body of the nude socialite sprawled across the bathroom floor, Detective Leary knew she had committed suicide by grasping the cap on the tamper-proof bottle, pushing down and twisting while she kept her thumb firmly pressed against the spot the arrow pointed to, until she hit the exact spot where the tab clicks into place, allowing her to remove the cap and swallow the entire contents of the bottle, thus ending her life. (1997
winner)
Dolores breezed along the surface of her life like a flat stone forever skipping across smooth water, rippling reality sporadically but oblivious to it consistently, until she finally lost momentum, sank, and due to an overdose of fluoride as a child which caused her to lie forever on the floor of her life as useless as an appendix and as lonely as a five-hundred-pound barbell in a steroid-free fitness center. (1990 winner)

She resolved to end the love affair with Ramon tonight ... summarily, like Martha Stewart ripping the sand vein out of a shrimp's tail ... though the term "love affair" now struck her as a ridiculous euphemism ... not unlike "sand vein," which is after all an intestine, not a vein ... and that tarry substance inside certainly isn't sand ... and that brought her back to Ramon.
(2004 winner)

Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you've had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean. (2006 winner)

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. (2007 winner)