Introducing a story to a reader is a lot like dropping a pickup line on someone: do it the wrong way and they’ll wind up under the covers with a different… book.
Here to show you how it’s done are the top twenty-five cold openings in Western literature. For some additional insight, we’ve included speculations as to the thought process that might have influenced each author’s writing. Enjoy!
1. Ice, Ice Ba—Whaaat?
Opener: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”
Book: One Hundred Years of Solitude
Author: Gabriel García Márquez
Creative Thought Process: Before getting into that whole “ice” thing, unceremoniously mention that Buendía eventually has to stare down a firing squad. That’ll buy at least a hundred pages of curiosity.
2. A Real Page-Burner
Opener: “It was a pleasure to burn.”
Book: Fahrenheit 451
Author: Ray Bradbury
Creative Thought Process: Juxtapose the anarchic verb “to burn” with an alluring noun like “pleasure.” Hope a major cigarette company doesn’t steal the phrase some forty years down the road.
3. April Cowers
Opener: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
Book: 1984
Author: George Orwell
Creative Thought Process: To properly set the mood for a futuristic dystopia, combine the elements of springtime, coldness, an unlucky number, and bells tolling. Then, watch people fight over the feasibility of a clock that can strike thirteen.
4. Post-Partum Possession
Opener: “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.”
Book: Beloved
Author: Toni Morrison
Creative Thought Process: Make the subject of the sentence an obscure sequence of numbers to get the reader’s attention. In case that doesn’t work, follow up with a terrifying, baby-related metaphor.
5. F. M. L.
Opener: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”
Book: Metamorphosis
Author: Franz Kafka
Creative Thought Process: Ease the reader into Gregor Samsa’s misfortunes by describing his nightsweats about… Meh, skip to the giant cockroach.
6. Ve Believe In Nah-sing, Lebowski!
Opener: “Mama died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know.”
Book: The Stranger
Author: Albert Camus
Creative Thought Process: In order to sell the whole involuntary-manslaughter thing, start by making the guy seem detached. Okay, more detached. Just a little more. PERFECT!
7. Hole-y Middle-earth, Batman!
Opener: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”
Book: The Hobbit
Author: J.R.R. Tolkien
Creative Thought Process: In the interest of thoroughness, approach the most epic alternate universe in all of literature by starting with a hole in the ground.
8. Gray-Per-View
Opener: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
Book: Neuromancer
Author: William Gibson
Creative Thought Process: Methinks I shall write the greatest opening line ever. Donesies.
9. Out There
Opener: “They’re out there. Black boys in white suits up before me to commit sex acts in the hall and get it mopped up before I can catch them.”
Book: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Author: Ken Kesey
Creative Thought Process: First, open with something that conveys paranoia. Mentioning the ambiguous ol’ “they” is a good start, but driving it home will require something more specific. Hmm…
10. Fragile: Do Not Stack
Opener: “When I was three and Bailey four, we had arrived in the musty little town, wearing tags on our wrists which instructed – ‘To Whom It May Concern’ – that we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson Jr., from Long Beach, California, en route to Stamps, Arkansas, c/o Mrs. Annie Henderson.”
Book: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Author: Maya Angelou
Creative Thought Process: Casually inform the reader that these children might not be in the best hands. Start by Fed-Ex-ing them 1,600 miles.
11. Hi, My Name Is (WHAT?!)
Opener: “Call me Ishmael.”
Book: Moby-Dick
Author: Herman Melville
Creative Thought Process: Well, you should probably include at least one short sentence.
12. …Goes To-gether Like a Horse and Car-riage!
Opener: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
Book: Anna Karenina
Author: Leo Tolstoy
Creative Thought Process: Give the readers an impossibly oversimplified statement about mankind, then sit back and watch them realize that it’s actually true.
13. The Reckonin’
Opener: “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly.”
Book: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Author: Mark Twain
Creative Thought Process: Write a 43-chapter novel entirely in rural slang. From the perspective of a 13-year-old boy. Who’s uneducated. While you’re at it, make it the greatest novel in American history.
14. Universal Spoof
Opener: “It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.”
Book: Pride and Prejudice
Author: Jane Austen
Creative Thought Process: Write sarcastically during an era so prudish that future generations will actually mistake you as being serious.
15. Whatever, Nevermind
Opener: “If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.”
Book: The Catcher in the Rye
Author: J.D. Salinger
Creative Thought Process: Offhandedly trash-talk the classics, gloss over any specifics, and leave everyone wanting more. Make sure Holden, the narrator, is one hundred percent unable to repeat this technique on women.
16. Great Balls of Fire
Opener: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul.”
Book: Lolita
Author: Vladimir Nabokov
Creative Thought Process: Subtly allude to the fact that the love interest is only thirteen by writing her name in the diminutive, “-ita” form. Throwing the word “sin” in there probably isn’t a bad idea either.
17. Bombs Over Bag-Lady
Opener: “It was the day my grandmother exploded.”
Book: The Crow Road
Author: Iain Banks
Creative Thought Process: Open with a bang. Scratch that – open with a violent human combustion. See where it takes you…
18. Old Man Liver
Opener: “I am a sick man… I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I think my liver is diseased.”
Book: Notes from the Underground
Author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
Creative Thought Process: Start with some creepy character building. Sick? Check. Spiteful? Check. Unattractive? Check. TMI? Double check.
19. Prose In Different Area Codes
Opener: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”
Book: A Tale of Two Cities
Author: Charles Dickens
Creative Thought Process: It was earth, it was sky, it was sun, it was moon, it was salt, it was pepper… Um…
20. That Peaceful, Queasy Feeling
Opener: “My mother is standing in front of the bathroom mirror smelling polished and ready; like Jean Naté, Dippity Do and the waxy sweetness of lipstick. Her white, handgun-shaped blow-dryer is lying on top of the wicker clothes hamper, ticking as it cools. She stands back and smoothes her hands down the front of her swirling, psychedelic Pucci dress, biting the inside of her cheek. ’Damn it,’ she says, ’something isn’t right.’”
Book: Running with Scissors
Author: Augusten Burroughs
Creative Thought Process: Throw the reader into the body of an innocent young kid. Drop some hints that mom may be a lot of work. Buckle up; this ain’t The Brady Bunch.
21. Nowhere Man
Opener: “Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”
Book: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Author: Douglas Adams
Creative Thought Process: Put the readers in their place. You know, light-eons away from anything of significance.
22. A Nicens Little Title
Opener: “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo.”
Book: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Author: James Joyce
Creative Thought Process: What haven’t you tried yet ah yes baby talk that will be new.
23. Road Trippin’
Opener: “We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold.”
Book: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
Author: Hunter S. Thompson
Creative Thought Process: Dropkick the readers into chaos. Right after dropping some… ahem.
24. Shark Bait Hoo-Ha-Ha!
Opener: “He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.”
Book: The Old Man and the Sea
Author: Ernest Hemingway
Creative Thought Process: Write about an old, grizzled man’s man who takes on an entire ocean. To distract everyone from the fact that mother used to dress you as a girl.
25. Scottish Rogue
Opener: “The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling.”
Book: Trainspotting
Author: Irvine Welsh
Creative Thought Process: If readin aboot heroin junkies disnae make ya sweat, readin throo mah brogue will.
Those are some memorable lines!
“You’re wha’? said Jimmy Rabbitte Sr”. From ‘The Snapper’ by Roddy Doyle – 2 words that completely set the scene (if you know Dublin)
How do you miss The War Hound and the World’s Pain? “It was in that year when the fashion in cruelty demanded not only the crucifixion of peasant children, but a similar fate for their pets, that I first met Lucifer and was transported into Hell; for the Prince of Darkness wished to strike a bargain with me.”
A screaming comes across the sky.
The line from “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” is also probably one of the greatest opening lines of any movie as well. Just something about the phrasing that makes it sear into your thoughts and stay there.
Thank you for putting in the Neuromancer line. I was ready to call bullshit if it wasn’t in there.
John Varley’s Steel Beach: “In five years, the penis will be obsolete.”
Good choices. Some more:
“A screaming comes across the sky” Thomas Pynchon, *Gravity’s Rainbow*
“The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass twisted and righted when he entered the hall and again when he shut the door.” Cormac McCarthy, *All The Pretty Horses*
“When they came south out of Grant County Boyd was not much more than a baby and the newly formed county they’d named Hildago was itself little older than the child.” Cormac McCarthy (again), *The Crossing”
“They sent him to Dalls to kill a nigger pimp named Wendell Durfee. He wasn’t sure he could do it.” James Ellroy, *The Cold Six Thousand*
“When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs Nugent.” Patrick McCabe, *The Butcher Boy*
Sorry. This is like salted peanuts for me.
“There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim, Dim being really Dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.”
“Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.”
Yes this list is terribly flawed in not including “a Clockwork Orange”.
What about Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time?
“It was a dark and stormy night.”
“Describe, using diagrams where appropriate, the exact circumstances leading to your death”
from “Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers” (first Red Dwarf book), Grant Naylor.
I can’t believe you left out Stephne King’s Gunslinger: “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed”
I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice-not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother’s death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany.
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” -The Dark Tower I: The Gunslinger
“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”
Finnegans Wake – James Joyce
It’s always nice to begin again with the ending, or end once more with the beginning.
“The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” – Stephen King, The Gunslinger (The Dark Tower, Book 1)
What about the best introduction to the greatest character in American literature?
“A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs. In the shadow under the green visor of the cap Ignatius J. Reilly’s supercilious blue and yellow eyes looked down upon the other people waiting at the clock at the D. H. Holmes department store, studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste in dress.”
A Confederacy of Dunces
-John Kennedy Toole
Stephen King, The Gunslinger: “The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.”
Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian: “See the child.”
“The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.” – G. K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill
“The small boys came early for the hanging.”. Ken Follett – The Pillars of the Earth. Still my all time favourite.
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.
What? Not including the opening line from The Dresden Files novel “Blood Rites”?
“The building was on fire and it wasn’t my fault.”
Yeah, going to have to call bullshit for no mention of “The Forever War” by Joe Haldeman:
Tonight we’re going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.
Howard Roark laughed.
[...] [...]
The luminosity of these lines is made only that much more intense by your infantile commentary on them. “Donesies”???
If this is how you go about making literature relevant, I, for one, vote to let it remain obscure . . .
“Not to every young girl is it given to enter the harem of the Sultan of Turkey and return to her homeland a virgin.” Dorothy Dunnett, The Ringed Castle
Nicely compiled list, a joy to read through. Appreciated the bits of insight as well.
But as for the reason I’m commenting – the silly titles for each entry? Was that really necessary? I had to deliberately ignore the orange typeface to get through this. Very annoying. A lame attempt more appropriate for a frat-guy men’s magazine. The audience of this article might be able to handle the content without the extraneous packaging.
I was going to be annoyed if The Stranger was not on this list…
“Involution ocean” – Bruce Sterling:
“We all have an emptiness in our lives, an emptiness that some fill with art, some with God, some with learning. I have always filled the emptiness with drugs.”
I’m sorry, but the awful trying-to-be-funny titles completely ruined this list for me. Why not put the actual titles of the books as the titles and leave the incredibly stupid captions out all together?
“Scarlett O’Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realized it.”- Gone with the Wind
-Z
“the young boys came early to the hanging”
What about “Who is John Galt” – one of the most well-known openers in literature. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
It has been said, but seriously: ‘The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.’ The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger, Stephen King.
I would humbly submit:
“Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Four shots ripped into my groin and I was off on the greatest adventure of my life!”
-Sleep Till Noon by Max Shulman
Huston,… the Eagle has landed …, ho crap!!@
seriously though, a screaming comes across the sky.
“Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time.” -Slaughterhouse 5
How could you leave out Ellen Foster by Kaye Gibbons?
“When I was little I would think of ways to kill my daddy.”
“A is for alligator, high in the sky.”
N is for Nostril
I can’t believe that line was omitted from the list.
“Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.” – Kurt Vonnegut – Cat’s Cradle
Agreed with Derek C. F. Pegritz. How did you forget the opening to The Gunslinger.
From The Android’s Dream by John Scalzi:
“Dirk Moeller didn’t know if he could fart his way into a major diplomatic incident. But he was ready to find out.”
Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu : Du côté de chez Swann « Longtemps je me suis couché de bonne heure. »
“For a long time I went to bed early” : one of the most famous opening sentences of all french litterature.
I would like to add another vote for “The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed.” – Stephen King, The Gunslinger.
Also: “Man, I look fantastic in this derby.” – Awesome, by Jack Pendarvis
“You are reading this for the wrong reason.” Dan Simmons, Endymion
Who is John Galt?