This year's 10 winners of the Bulwer-Lytton contest

[wordsmythe]

This year's 10 winners of the Bulwer-Lytton contest,
aka "Dark and Stormy Night Contest" (run by the
English Dept. of San Jose State University), wherein
one writes only the first line of a bad novel:

10) "As a scientist, Throckmorton knew that if he were
ever to break wind in the echo chamber, he would never
hear the end of it."

9) "Just beyond the Narrows, the river widens."

8) "With a curvaceous figure that Venus would have
envied, a tanned, unblemished oval face framed with
lustrous thick brown hair, deep azure-blue eyes
fringed with long black lashes, perfect teeth that
vied for competition, and a small straight nose,
Marilee had a beauty that defied description."

7) "Andre, a simple peasant, had only one thing on his
mind as he crept along the East wall: 'Andre creep...
Andre creep... Andre creep.'"

6) "Stanislaus Smedley, a man always on the cutting
edge of narcissism, was about to give his body and
soul to a back alley sex-change surgeon to become the
woman he loved."

5) "Although Sarah had an abnormal fear of mice, it
did not keep her from eeking out a living at a local
pet store."

4) "Stanley looked quite bored and somewhat detached,
but then penguins often do."

3) "Like an over-ripe beefsteak tomato rimmed with
cottage cheese, the corpulent remains of Santa Claus
lay dead on the hotel floor."

2) "Mike Hardware was the kind of private eye who
didn't know the meaning of the word 'fear'; a man who
could laugh in the face of danger and spit in the eye
of death -- in short, a moron with suicidal
tendencies."

AND THE WINNER IS...

1) "The sun oozed over the horizon, shoved aside
darkness, crept along the greensward, and, with sickly
fingers, pushed through the castle window, revealing
the pillaged princess, hand at throat, crown asunder,
gaping in frenzied horror at the sated, sodden
amphibian lying beside her, disbelieving the magnitude
of the frog's deception, screaming madly, 'You lied!'"