John Hardi, a resident of The Little City, received a “dishonorable mention” in the Purple Prose category of this year’s Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, according to Professor Scott Rice, an English professor at San Jose State University (SJSU).

The English department at SJSU has sponsored the contest, which challenges entrants to compose the opening sentence to worst of all possible novels, since 1982.

It was conceived after Rice tracked down the origin of the clichéd line “It was a dark and stormy night,” that first appeared in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford.

Hardi’s winning entry was “The Contessa’s heart was pounding hard and fast, like an out-of-balance clothes washer, which can get that way if you mix jeans with a lot of light things, though the new ones have some sensor thing to counteract that or shut off, but the Contessa’s heart didn’t have anything like that, so she had to sit down and tell Don Rolando to keep his hands to himself for a while.”