It gives me great pleasure to announce that your submissions to our latest short fiction competition have earned Boing Boing the top spot at Google for the search term "literary travesties." We are all winners today.
Only one of you, however, gets the $1,800 Envy 15 laptop offered by HP. The theme was "Re-write a scene from one classic book in the incongruous literary style of another." This was insanely difficult to judge; more than ever, selecting a winner feels more like the rejection of countless brilliant efforts. After the jump, the victor and more favorites.
Prize Winner: This SF recast of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude gives it an unexpectedly poignant kick. Posted early, it became the standard against which new entries were continually weighed –until I realized that this meant author Miguel Esquirol had aced it.
Blind Zen Archer offers some Fear and Loathing in Northanger Abbey.
Selenographer renders Vladimir Nabokov's edit of Albert Camus' The Stranger
Agsone's No Country for Old Jeeves serves up an enduring image of Stephen Fry as Antoine Chigurh.
Making the implicit explicit in J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan might be a parlor game, but it's rarely done with as much style as Dr. Moonfire.
Pyramid Head Louse's retelling of The Princess and the Pea can stand on one leg and explain its philosophy.
J.D. Salinger! I liked Ben Curnett's Catcher in the Sky and Jacquewsphoto's Romeo and Juliet best of all.
You can thank CC for The neuromancer's guide to the galaxy.
Comparanoid's Kurtz holds forth on the horror of inadequately-maintained Georgian dolls.
JML's Cthulolita is the loathe of my life.
Orwell! For Boba Fett Diop, it is christmas in 1984. Not so for Suburbanburn's
Seuss 1984.
A Tolkien trilogy: Eangerwickett's Twilight offers a very well-to-do vampire and lmm227's Hobbit quotes The Raven — it's not the last we'll hear of Poe. "Hells bells," said the Balrog, as an immediate prelude to a fall into the abyss.
Drono's Nadsat Little Prince is appropriately baffling, and he made a wonderful illustration to go with it.
Thevalidvictorian's wedding of Ayn Rand and Gilbert & Sullivan was reported to the moderators as awesome.
SavannahJFoley's Oliver Twist in the style of Chuck P. was the best of the Fight Clubbers!
Further reading: Anonymous's mashup of Ben Hur and Dr. Seuss; UKMella's Clockwork Zombie; Giant Robot Architect's trip up the garden path; and Nilchii's clever rendering of Oedipus in the style of John Gardner.
There were good 'stunt' entries, too: William Faulkner's Hamlet, a play in five words; House of Snapes; a new Eye of Argon; and the Gothic Hungry Caterpillar. Also: Ook!
Finally, Shad Boiling charms us with Goodnight Dune: history will recall our writhes.
