Posted by Splay on October 04, 2004 at 17:52:48:
Worst Story Contest: The Results
Before I get started, let me say a few words:
It is a great honor to have been chosen to judge this prestigious contest. [I don't know how I let myself get roped into these things.] It's been a pleasure reading and re-reading all the wonderful submissions. [What a nightmare. I think I've suffered real damage to my sensibilities.] Each and every author has every right to be proud of their work. [I only pray for your sakes that you didn't use your real names.] To have had the opportunity to be among the first to read these masterpieces is a privilege I will always cherish in my heart of hearts. [I feel like I need a shower, followed by a high colonic, a course of penicillin, a whole-body dermabrasion, a blood transfusion, psychotherapy and a cookie.] Thank you all. [Thanks a lot.]
OK, let's go:
I had thought I might try to quantify the different aspects of each story and award points for each--plot, character development, language, editing, and so on--but I got so many zeroes that way I gave up on the idea. So, I'll base my judgement on overall impression, which will be easy to do for the worst of the worst, but not so easy for the others: can I reward with a win a writer who has produced a favorable impression? These stories are supposed to be bad. Anyway, come with me now as I begin my stroll down Horseapple Lane. In alphabetical order as they appear on my hard drive:
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A Bad Story
by Clemstra
Clemstra's story fails miserably on many levels. It's way too short, for starters, ending just when it should have gotten rolling. Her choice of theme could hardly be worse, sure to disappoint any necro-regular. The plot, for want of an insulting word, is crappy imitation melodrama. There's poor typing, and the last line isn't even really English. A dismal effort that merits close attention.
On the other hand, it makes sense, there's a girl with big tits in bondage (always a good thing), and the character's names are amusingly contrived. The overall impression is comically cartoony.
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Bad Childe Story
by Childe
Whatever is wrong with this writer, it's nothing small. This story's main downfall, to me, is that I got only a few lines in when I started thinking, "Why am I still reading this?" and I kept on thinking that right through to the end. It's riddled with embarassingly puerile puns and painfully pointless wordplay. Reading this story is like being on a long plane flight with the kid in the seat in front of you staring at you the whole time over his headrest and picking his nose. And eating it. And grinning with the booger stuck to his teeth. It was both difficult and unpleasant to read, and therefore a serious contender.
But. The very difficulty of the piece sets the reader a challenge--it becomes a sort of puzzle to be solved--and one gets a sense of accomplishment from having grokked the idiom and divined the references. Also, for all its pathetically desperate would-be wit, the writer's talent shines through, and the story has something of the quality of legitimate stream-of-consciousness, but deliberately sabotaged, and that deliberateness is a giveaway that partly spoils the effect.
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The Bad thing about being the girl next door living next to a sirial killer
by Rache
It's hard to say what's the most offensive element in this story--the idiotic, self-centered persona; the gutter English; the crude, sometimes almost incomprehensible, composition; the disappointing truncated plot; the improbable devices; the artless title.... Rache has taken desultory first-person literary masturbation to a new low. Big points off especially for dictional incongruity (Rache knows what I mean).
An otherwise perfect disguise is betrayed, though, by the writer's apparently irrepressible instinct for comedy. The moron who is supposed to have written this couldn't have gotten me so effectively with that haiku, and the dialogue is funny, not so much in spite of its unimaginativeness and disjuncture, but because of it and because of the writer's finely-tuned ear.
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bulldozer story...sorta
by Rache
DISQUALIFIED
I'm not going to dignify this entry with analysis. What was Rache thinking? This is not a bad story, it's a good story.
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"Hail to the Chief!"
by Wilkinson Sword
Gratuitous, ill-informed political commentary has no place in a snuff story. Way to go, WS. And with the story told from the POV of the president, the reader cannot but fail to identify with the protagonist because he's already somebody else. The 9/11 reference is jarring and offensive. The forced, unlikely sequence of events further distracts the reader, and the "surprise" ending is like a bowl of minestrone for dessert. The literary corpus has emitted a wet fart here.
Still, the climax is half-decent necro, and the writing overall is plenty good enough for an amateur.
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"Fuck This Shit"
by Wilkinson Sword
I've had to bend the rules as I understand them to consider this one at all, it not really being a story, per se. But I've concluded that its very submission as a story shows such a thorough ignorance of the most basic principles of storytelling on the part of the submitter that it deserves its opportunity for opprobrium. It towers alone upon the single pillar of Ineptitude. The writer has gone to no trouble at all to waste the reader's time. To boot, it's entirely plagiarized!
The only thing that redeems this mess is that some of what's there is pretty good in its own right.
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Glockspiel
by C
C has taken the boilerplate necrobabes messageboard snuff story form and filled in the blanks with the worst writing he can muster. The result is too short, too predictable, too silly and not too satisfying. Particularly glaring is the exquisitely maladroit description. The writer has every right to feel embarrassed that people can see this piece of crap.
Too bad it's too good. I never knew a Glock went "thwock," but it figures. The title evinces a literate playfulness inappropriate for a worst story submission. The closing, well, monologue, is rather clever.
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my gud story
by gud writter
Like, wow, man. This one like totally sucks. You have to imagine this story being posted on the board as a serious attempt. When you put it in that context, it's downright alarming. The author is obviously a dim-witted sex murderer who's taken it into his head for the moment that his garbled confessions are literature.
I liked the misspelling "band" for "banged" a lot.
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A Hurried Bad Story Entry
by Crew
Turgid sword-and-sorcery-style preamble degenerates inexplicably into offhand contemporary snuff. Clumsiness of expression vies with temporal incongruity for the reader's attention, leaving the story itself to die unattended. My notes from my initial reading say "pure shit."
The badness of this submission consists mainly in the grating shift in style. Its readability and the mostly correct simulation of the antique style in the first part keep this one off the bottom, I'm afraid.
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I knows I kin do this...I CAN write a bad story
by Barbanne
DISQUALIFIED
No, you can't. Not this time, anyway. I see what you were trying for, of course, but your talent is stronger than you. What ended up on the page is droll satire with a few deft tidbits your talent slipped in while you were thinking how to bite the big one. Sorry.
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Dreaming Innocence
by Rache
Inappropriately couched in romance-novel fluff and with a disappointing ending, "Dreaming Innocence" was torture to read. This entry may well be the hardest one of all for me to forgive, not because it sucked in the ordinary sense (it was actually quite well-written), but because it took me someplace I didn't want to go and held me there with delicate chains of fragrant blossoms fresh from some springtime bower of...bleccccch! Will somebody strangle this bitch, please?
The high quality of the perfumed prose puts this one out of the running.
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The Iron Horse
by NL
DISQUALIFIED
This is a brilliant piece of fiction I intend to study so I can get some idea how he did it. He's blended raw power and subtle insight in a way I don't think I've seen before.
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'The Necrophile Hairdresser' or...'Janet's Demise'
by Kojak
An absolutely awful first paragraph sets us up for a spate of tedious exposition culminating in a lackluster climax and a ridiculous deus ex machina finale. To add insult to injury, there's an epilogue. This writer has gone for garden-variety bad fiction, and he's hit the nail on the head. It's got bad writing, bad plot, bad characters, bad editing and a bad ending, but mostly bad writing. The writing is bad. Very bad. It's not what you'd call "bad in a good way," it's bad. It's not that it's illiterate or obscure, it's just bad. Not even funny bad. Bad.
Too bad he managed to avoid causing the reader the esthetic agony that would have rsulted from his taking his job more seriously. The camel was over the top, and broke the spell for me.
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Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan?
by Rache
I would swear Rache was testing me with this one, but she didn't know I'd be doing this. This story is high-end bad. It's bad like certain Hemingway, but in a different way. Its badness lies not in its writing or line or composition--there's nothing you can point to and say, "See? Right there. That's why it stinks." I think we're seeing the output of a good writer in a slump. As you read "les neiges," you begin to sense a slow leak somewhere that leaves you flat in the end, and you realize it was boring and stupid, though you couldn't really tell as it was happening.
As a perverted sex story it's a total failure--so much so that I'd disqualify it as off-topic if I hadn't been so fascinated by its subtle lameness.
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The Meal
by Al Omega
A little sleight of hand, well executed and amusing. But not "bad" except in its betrayal of the necrophile's expectations.
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my worst story entry...since it is off topic (the story I mean)
by Rache
When I was done reading this, I had a lump in my throat. Turns out it was my testicles looking for a place to hide behind my larynx. My penis hasn't shrunk so much since that time at the Jersey shore when I was eight and went swimming too early in the year when the water was about 60 degrees. Off topic? Whatever makes you think that? It's only the antidote to Viagra.
Actually, this story was one of the funniest things I've ever read, given the context. I started laughing halfway through and didn't stop for a while after the end. The writer has an uncanny sense of what a man doesn't want to hear about; she clearly knows better than we ourselves do. Just when you think it can't get any worse, it does, and then again and again and again.
The ending is a bit of a letdown, though, for our purposes here. It would have been better to keep hammering on that one note harder and harder until the piano broke than to segue into some mock beguine.
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Bad story 2--
by NL
The self-referential has always been a pet peeve of mine. I hate movies about people making a movie or plays about stage actors or pieces like this one--stories about writers, especially a first-person story about the writer himself and his own goddamn writing. Who cares? I sure don't.
Having correctly chosen the wrong approach, the writer conjures an annoying persona who proceeds to bore us half to death with his problems, occasionally mentioning something to do with snuff. It's quite a trick to do a bloodless rendering of bloody murder, but that's what we have here. The only emotion I felt throughout the whole piece was irk. Excellent work.
I have reservations, though. The writing itself was far too coherent, and the character's prattling became a somewhat entertaining juggling act at one point.
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Cindy's dream 'Tugboat Captain Ralph's adventure' Bad Story
by Kojak
Who let the friggin' pirates in here? Pirates aren't sexy. As a matter of fact, when I want to hold off shooting my load, one thing I do is think about pirates. If there have to be pirates, couldn't they at the very least hang a Spanish princess from the yardarm in her petticoats, her golden hoop earrings twinkling and flashing in the Caribbean sun, silent staccato for her final frenzied flamenco? Huh? Jeez.
This story was far too funny, clever and entertaining to have a chance of making the "worst of the worst" list, but I have to say it does blow very much in its own peculiar way. I liked "crackling with fetid disrespecet [sic]" very much. Too bad the writer missed the opportunity to misspell "seamen."
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Dan Rather Epic
by Uncle Spam
Not only does this story have too many men in it, they shoot each other instead of the girl, who's already dead anyway when it begins. Instead of tittilation, we get the intellectual satisfaction of seeing three network newsclowns die, which is great, sure, but not what we're here for. The English is illiterate. This writer has missed every boat, probably because he lost track of time while jerking off to his own cleverness. An excellent lampoon of the stock bad story.
However, the dialogue is quite funny, and the writer shows too much skill in the spare but effective characterizations.
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Rectal Exam
by Wilkinson Sword
Tedious inside jokes, wooden dialogue, sickly action, and editing so poor the characters are still called HE and SHE ruin what would have been at least a mediocre amateur snuff tale. And yes, the title is all wrong, too.
Yet, for all its faults, it is a snuff tale, and I suspect that the blood-and-guts lovers among us would find it a little stimulating, so points off for that. Or is it points?
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The Way Wanna Went (where LUST and IDIOCY are eternally united)
by Emily
Godlike, the writer creates a world and invites us to enter, kind of like Tolkein...not. The reader is dragged protesting through a tropical land where the only law is random coincidence masquerading as fate. The poverty of the writer's imagination is exceeded only by her self-absorption. The writing is somehow both florid and infantile, perfect for the brainless cocksucking dicktease coed who must have written this abomination soon after looking at a globe for the first time in her life. Marvellous job.
I try to say something good about every story to reveal its weakness as a bad one, but I'm getting nothing here. Nothing's coming. Nope. It stinks to high heaven.
*******
WIKKID SISTA
by Barbanne
DISQUALIFIED
Way too good. What an ear for voice this writer has.
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Worst necro stroy ever
by Israeli guy
Move, I mean "roll," over, Rod Serling. This story--short, pointless and disappointing--is remarkable in that even though the writing is dreary, the writer managed to fail to set a dreary mood. I would be astonished to see this posted as an honest attempt, and therein lies its value.
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The Worst is yet to cum
by Emily
I laughed my ass off. This is the kind of story I was hoping for when I took this job. Vapid ramblings interspersed with labored metaphors make up the bulk of the work, which nonetheless blindly, and seemingly by dumb luck, gropes its way along a more-or-less straight plotline to the absurd ending. Only by accident does it miss the mark as necro--a masterful touch that sidesteps the problem of how be bad and on-topic at the same time. The climax defies description--a madcap maelstrom of misogynistic muddling, maybe. Fucking wow.
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Tinkerbell and Yum Yum
by C
DISQUALIFIED
I had a semi by the time Tink was done primping. That will not do.
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So, there you have it. Time to announce the winners. Envelope, please. And the winners are: (scroll down)
Best Bad Story
1. "The Worst is yet to cum" by Emily
2. "Cindy's dream" by Kojak
3. "my worst story entry" by Rache
Worst of the Worst (The Nellie)
"my gud story" by gud writter