The winner of the 2008 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest was announced today and-- WHOA! Garrison Spik's writing is so bad it makes the Anne Heche (author of the acclaimed autobiography Call Me Crazy) look like a Nobel Prize winner. But before you assume we're just picking on poor Spik, let us explain. 

Named after Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton the writer responsible for such famous drivel as "it was a dark and stormy night" and phrases like "the great unwashed" and "the almighty dollar," the contest gives $250 to the writer capable of coming up with the worst opening sentence to an unwritten novel. 

So how bad is the worst? Check Spik's below passage on, what else but "a New York love," and get a towel cause you're gonna need a shower.

Theirs was a New York love, a checkered taxi ride burning rubber, and like the city, their passion was open 24/7, steam rising from their bodies like slick streets exhaling warm, moist, white breath through manhole covers stamped "Forged by DeLaney Bros., Piscataway, N.J."

We're also partial to this submission by Dave Ronson of Calgary, Alberta: 

"Die, commie pigs!" grunted Sergeant "Rocky" Steele through his cigar stub as he machine-gunned the North Korean farm animals.

Zing! Who knew bad writing could be so good.