For 27 years, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest has been urging readers to send along the best of the worst opening lines for fictitious novels. They are always bad… which is good. And the best are really punny, even funny.

David McKenzie won this year’s contest. You can click through to read his entry. But I actually preferred the runner-up, so I include it below, plus a few others. If you do click through to their site, you can read all of the winners and runners-up in all the various categories.

This year’s Runner-Up was by Warren Blair:

The wind dry-shaved the cracked earth like a dull razor–the double edge kind from the plastic bag that you shouldn’t use more than twice, but you do; but Trevor Earp had to face it as he started the second morning of his hopeless search for Drover, the Irish Wolfhound he had found as a pup near death from a fight with a prairie dog and nursed back to health, stolen by a traveling circus so that the monkey would have something to ride.

Greg Homer’s “Vile Pun” category winner:

Using her flint knife to gut the two amphibians, Kreega the Neanderthal woman created the first pair of open-toad sandals.

Eric Rice won the “Detective” category with:

She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida – the pink ones, not the white ones – except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn’t wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren’t.

One of my favorite “Dishonorable Mentions” this year was penned by Dan Blaufuss:

As Lieutenant Baker shrank his lips back to their normal size, he tried desperately to think of a situation in which his new-found power might be useful, as have I, your narrator.