By Brendan McLaughlin

The winner of this year's Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest has been announced. 47 year old, Jim Gleeson's mangled prose is a thing of terrible beauty. 

Here's the winning sentence: 

"Gerald began -- but was interrupted by a piercing whistle which cost him ten percent of his hearing permanently, as it did everyone else in a ten-mile radius of the eruption, not that it mattered much because for them 'permanently' meant the next ten minutes or so until buried by searing lava or suffocated by choking ash -- to pee."