Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: comically appalling final paragraphs to the worst of all possible novels

Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Credit: Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo 
issue 22 April 2023

In Competition No. 3295, you were invited to submit a comically appalling final paragraph to the worst of all possible novels.

From time to time, I set a challenge that owes a debt to the Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton – who enjoyed a brief burst of popularity in his day, before falling out of favour – and to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which challenges participants to write an atrocious opening sentence to the worst novel never written.

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