Greg Laden told us to send you a nasty note, so I’m sending an E-flat major minor seventh twice removed and mixing it with an F blown on a trumpet by a second grade student in her third lesson at 4 AM.

Leopold looked up at the arrow piercing the skin of the dirigible with a sort of wondrous dismay — the wheezy shriek was just the sort of sound he always imagined a baby moose being beaten with a pair of accordions might make.

Having spent two hours in our local library on Friday, trying in vain to find some challenging fiction or at least a decent sci-fi novel, I ended up flicking through the pages of adventure novels. (It was that, westerns, romance, or granny crime.)

I soon discovered that adventure novel intros are almost identical to the spoof above—all that one lacks is an exclamation mark.

My own favourite first paragraph in the “so awesomely bad it’s good” stakes is from One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night:

William Connor was standing outside a disused cattleshed on a bright Highland summer’s morning, ankle-deep in cowshit, liquidised mercenary raining splashily down about his head from the crisp blue sky above.

She had the kind of body that made a man want to have sex with her.

I think I read this book when I was a kid:

Timothy Hanson, Commander of the 43rd Space Regiment in the 52nd Battalion on board the USAOPAC (United Space Alliance Of Planets Attack Carrier) and second in command to Admiral L. R. Morris of the USAOP Space Command, awoke early for breakfast.

But for genius bad writing, it is really hard to top The Eye of Argon.

It was a dark and stormy night, except when the lightning flashed, because then it wasn’t dark; it sort of turned the windows into a giant disco ball for a moment, but eventually the thunder and lightning stopped and it settled down to a steady light rain, so then it really was dark, but it would probably be a stretch to call it stormy.

It fits the original quite well.