The worst opening paragraph of a novel ever

Yesterday's excerpt reminded me of the most cringey part of my trip to Madrid this weekend. In the Malmo airport, bored like a model watching C-SPAN, I picked up a copy of Thomas Harris's "Hannibal Rising" and was greeted with this:

The door to Dr. Hannibal Lecter's memory palace is in the darkness at the center of his mind and it has a latch that can be found by touch alone. This curious portal opens on immense and well-lit spaces, early baroque, and corridors and chambers rivaling in number those of the Topkapi Museum.

Memory palace? Harris has been the Thomas Kincaid of the novel world for awhile now, but this is a whole new universe of suck. While plagiarism accusations have bounced around the literary world in the last year, Harris has obviously just been at home, trolling MySpace pages for couplets.

While we're at it, here's a yearly contest for the worst hypothetical first sentence of a novel:

Sex with Rachel after she turned fifty was like driving the last-place team on the last day of the Iditarod Dog Sled Race, the point no longer the ride but the finish, the difficulty not the speed but keeping all the parts moving in the right direction, not to mention all that irritating barking.

When she sashayed across the room, her breasts swayed like two house trailers passing on a windy bridge.

But I kind of think Harris's beats all of them.