Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition winners: the inspired awfulness of Dan Brown

The latest comp was a nod to the curiously enjoyable awfulness of the wildly rich, bestselling author Dan Brown’s much-mocked prose. You were invited to submit a short story in the style of the master. Geoffrey K. Pullum, professor of general linguistics at the University of Edinburgh, nails it when he describes Brown’s style as ‘not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad’. Here, for the uninitiated, is an oft-cited example of one of the most deliciously toe-curling sentences from Deception Point: ‘Overhanging her precarious body was a jaundiced face whose skin resembled a sheet of parchment paper punctured by two emotionless eyes.’ It was a nicely calibrated entry, in general, and fun to judge. The winners below are rewarded with £25 each and honourable mentions go to Adrian Fry and Sylvia Fairley.

Bill Greenwell Langdon stared steadily with his questing blue eyes at the poem the balding gigolo penned. What was it about the scansion? His heart pounded like a lineman’s hammer.

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