Son of 'It was A Dark And Stormy Night'  is the second of, to the best of my knowledge, five collections of entries in the annual "Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest". (The others being "It Was A Dark And Stormy Night", "Dark And Stormy Rides Again", "It Was A Dark And Stormy Night: The Final Conflict", and, I think, "Bride Of Dark And Stormy", if I'm not mistaken.) The Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest is a contest , named for Sir Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, whose "Paul Clifford" (1830) opens with the immortal line "It was a dark and stormy night...", which is run by Scott Rice and sponsored by San Jose State University, in which contestants vie to write the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels. Generally, the trick is to make the sentences as complex syntactically as it is possible to imagine, while violating as many rules of creative consistency as possible, and to be certain that no noun is without more than its share of purple-prose adjectives. This is not for everyone, but if this sounds like fun to you, it probably is. This is the third of the collections that I've read; I thought that "The Final Conflict" was better than the original; this is even better than that one. Beyond a doubt, this is one of the best ideas ever conceived. A University hosts a contest where the contestants try and come up with the most intentionally stupid opening lines for a novel. Needless to say, some