In Competition No. 3295, you were invited to submit a comically appalling final paragraph to the worst of all possible novels.

From time to time, I set a challenge that owes a debt to the Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton – who enjoyed a brief burst of popularity in his day, before falling out of favour – and to the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which challenges participants to write an atrocious opening sentence to the worst novel never written. Brian Murdoch’s entry opens with a nod to the notorious first sentence (a favourite of Snoopy) of Edward B-L’s 1830 novel Paul Clifford: ‘It was a dark and stormy night’. The winners, below, take £25.

And did they emerge, and was it finally, from the Labyrinth of Unanswerable Riddles over the Deserts of Inattention across the Strands of Ambiguity into the Ocean Unknowable? And if so, were they forever changed or eternally unchanged from whatever mutable or fixed entities they had been, or imagined they were, either when first they set forth or at any chosen point along this journey whose nature and duration even they, perhaps they least of all, could neither map nor measure? Could they now say, looking one to another or vice versa, that what they saw reflected that which they themselves were, or had changes wrought upon one, some or all left them a company in name only, a disparate aggregation of people, things and abstract concepts as unlikely to concur on the meaning of their Quest as to be capable of communicating the nature of their transcendental bafflement? Well?

Adrian Fry

As consciousness returned, Derek felt himself engulfed by a misty whirlwind of emotions so entangled that he could not separate one from another. In his blitzed and disoriented mind relief jostled with fear, horror with enchantment, rage with benevolence, pity with remorse. It was a strange, mysterious cocktail of feelings he had not experienced before.

What had happened? His recollection was a bewildering montage of images: the dwarf in the grotto, the German hotel, the dogs, the nude astrologue with her catastrophic predictions, the Dubonnet that must have been spiked.

But above all Amanda – tender, feisty Amanda. She who had been at his side through perilous ordeals, a distinguished feminist and professor of astrophysics who could mix it with the roughest of criminal psychopaths.

Where was his love?

Derek waited alone in the desolate, ruined landscape for the mist to clear, in two minds, hopeful and fearful as ever.

Basil Ransome-Davies

Hence, the Squire family of West Radnorshire, with Squire Esquire himself at its head again, was safely reunited by the timely intervention of their Herefordshire second cousins, who once more travelled from their singular apple cider plantations eight miles east of the county town, where the A438 now runs, to rescue the mess of family pottage from extinction – and who was more glad than Miss Caterina Squire, whose rubicund face, although now sadly rugose, had beamed upon the locals and their fizzy produce for four score years and more, and whose dynastic roots lay even more deeply in the soil than the tribes of malus pumila on which they depended? No one. Yet their triumph was tempered, as ever, by the passage of time, for when greatness is bestowed upon the shoulders of ancients, dispassionate passers-by will ever see the younger generation at play, ripe for the plucking.

Bill Greenwell

There is of course no denouement. There never can be. An author’s bold Finis will always lack the final h that time alone may breathe upon it. The last full stop is still only a punctuation mark. It just signals only an interval, as American freely acknowledges with its ‘period’. So I know no more than you what happened when lumpen Gavin returned home and fumbled his Freudian key into the lock. Did Delphine recognise the sound and reach for her phone? Or had she already left, taking Graymalkin scratching furiously at its basket? Over to you, if I may say so. Your hand has been held long enough. You’ve been generously fed all too many characters and lines of plot. Put the book down now and use your own imagination to work with what you’ve been given. Or maybe write your own novel. Farewell…       

W.J. Webster

We follow George and Mary, dear reader, into a little café where Mary waits expectantly for George’s announcement. As we have seen so often, George is quite oblivious to Mary’s anxieties and is happy to hug his coffee cup, but catching her eye, he senses she is waiting for him to say something, and he does. ‘I know the time has come, Mary, and our friendship has come a long way and it means a lot to me and of course I do want to get married but….’ George’s but was a big one and for Mary it stank to high heaven like all his unfulfilled promises. She jumped up and snatched her umbrella, leaving George’s behind, where it would sit for a full hour as George thought about her reaction. It may shock the reader to learn that their affair ends here, as does our tale.

Frank McDonald

And so, Sir Bucolic Wiggins the Semi-Halfling wielded the Wand of Destiny, having survived not only the interminably long journey with the dwarves, the battle of Smackdown with the Wizards of Gamellon, the lightning-stone of Xbrzstyn and the flight of the D’renn space-elves into the Vworp Galaxy, but also the snares of the talking tree-goddess of Voronor, and the rescue of the beauteous Princess Hottycakes from the clutches of Emperor Soth. He had succeeded whilst being stalked by the Dragons of Splork and the Laser-Eyed Kittens, avoiding the Council of Un-Nobles seeking to retake the Throne of Spoons. Now he could finally restore balance to his rustic homeland of Pigsty-on the-Wold – realising as he did so that after eight hundred and seventeen chapters he was really a spotty teen named Colin, and should not have had that herbal pipe before playing geeky games with his fellow uni students.         

Janine Beacham

No. 3298: triplicate

You are invited to provide a book review in three haikus. Please email entries to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on 3 May.