Edward Bulwer-Lytton was a 19th century British author who wrote exceptionally
bad prose, made famous in the modern era from the Peanuts cartoon
character, Snoopy, and his eternal quest to write a book beginning with
Bulwer-Lytton’s classic opening, “It was a dark and stormy night.” The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest is an actual annual event that asks
entrants to compose the worst possible opening sentence to a novel by using bad
prose with terrifying strings of adjectives ranging in categories from general
to western, science fiction, romance, and so on. We thought there was a need for a religion category, with the sub-category of heresy. So here are our entries:
My favorite – the current state of the local Diocese: Heresy hung heavy over the diocese like a dank dark cloud of doom dripping its poison to form one giant river of Modernism that flowed unimpeded through the diocese with tributary streams to the parishes, trickling down to the soul of each and every man, woman, and child, therefore despite the flood of new diocesan programs and policies, the loss of faith soared.
