Last spring, we challenged the best writers on the planet to write us the first lines of the worst novel never written. We gave them the following examples to draw from for inspiration.

While we were confident that our examples represented arguably the very worst prose ever crafted by a deranged monkey on a typewriter, we were proven wrong by several great writers who took the time and effort to mail us the very worst dribble ever written by the human hand.

Here are the winners.

By: Mary Beth Kimbosz
He smelled like egg and ham. As he sat on the sofa, in his white t-shirt and unzipped dirty blue jeans, yolk dripped from his chin onto the worn carpet below. When the knock on the door came, a heavy sigh and a short forlorn stare covered his half-eaten sandwich.

“Who is it?”

“Police.”

By: Jes Degryse
It was just a normal day in the park until Steven’s dog Barky crapped out a diamond, or rather, a turd with a diamond shining dimly from within it. ‘What a discovery!’ thought Steven. He couldn’t have been more pleased than if his elderly neighbour had died suddenly, leaking a stench into his own apartment and alerting him to the fact that the old woman’s possessions were lying in wait for him, unplundered and expectant, like a bridegroom at the altar.

By: Irene Linderman
Walking back to the dorm on Tuesday morning after a night of mediocre sex with a woman who held his fate in her hands, Norlan's thoughts were divided between the dilemma of unrequited love and his doctoral thesis – specifically the amphibian experimental subjects who had responded to the drug exactly how he had posited they would and then proceeded to all die suddenly in the night. Cruel coincidence? Experimental error? Cold blooded assassination? Norlan had to know the truth.