In Honor Of This Night

The famous line (1) used by Snoopy, the beagle character in the Charles Schultz Peanuts comic strip seems appropriate for a night like this: as the sky darkens, the rains become heavier, and the hurricane approaches....

It Was A Dark And Stormy Night
by Snoopy

The Author at Work

Part I

It was a dark and stormy night. 

Suddenly, a shot rang out!
 
A door slammed. The maid screamed. 

Suddenly, a pirate ship appeared on the horizon!


While millions of people were starving, the king lived
in luxury. 

Meanwhile, on a small farm in Kansas, a boy was
growing up.

Part II

A light snow was falling, and the little girl with the tattered shawl had not sold a violet all day. 

At that very moment, a young intern at City Hospital was
making an important discovery. 

The mysterious patient in Room 213 had finally awakened. 

She moaned softly. 

Could it be that she was the sister of the boy in Kansas
who loved the girl with the tattered shawl who was the
daughter of the maid who had escaped from the pirates?

The intern frowned. 

"Stampede!" the foreman shouted, and forty thousand head
of cattle thundered down on the tiny camp. 

The two men rolled on the ground grappling beneath the murderous hooves.

A left and a right. A left. Another left and right. An
uppercut to the jaw. 

The fight was over. And so the ranch
was saved.

The young intern sat by himself in one corner of the
coffee shop. he had learned about medicine, but more
importantly, he had learned something about life.

THE END
_____________________________
(1) The first 'dark and stormy night' was conjured up by the English Victorian novelist, playwright and politician who rejoiced in the name of Sir Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton. It has become synonymous with the Victorian melodramatic style, of which Bulwer-Lytton's many works provide numerous examples. This style has long been out of fashion and considered kitsch and risible. So much so that, since 1982, an annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest has been sponsored by the English Department of San José State University, California. Contestants are required "to compose the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels".

Bulwer-Lytton's own florid pre-contest attempt, in his novel Paul Clifford, 1830, began:

"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents - except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."