IT was a dark and stormy night.

Or rather: it is, at present, a dark and stormy night.

You open I, BULBOUS to page 1 and already, on page 1 of I, BULBOUS, you find yourself trapped in some sort of lair and, resisting your best readerly instincts to put the book down and do something better with your time, you keep reading, eyes scrolling across the page and down the paragraph, rolling like a twin pair of pinballs along the predetermined course of some great textual Rube Goldberg machine whose denouement, though as yet unimaginable to you, is - or so you imagine - crushingly unimpressive, and still you read, and the further you read, the lower your eyelids droop, and deeper and deeper you fall under the spell of The Author, and thus, less and less escapably - which is to say more and more inescapably - do you find yourself trapped in the aforementioned lair, which, little by little, is becoming more and more populated with detail.

The aforementioned lair, like the aforementioned night, is dark, and its lone window - semi-shaded by a crooked set of venetian blinds - affords a glimpse of the night, which, in addition to being dark, as mentioned above, is also, as also mentioned above, stormy. The aforementioned lair is outfitted with many of the items you would expect to find in a lair, aforementioned or otherwise. These items might include (but are not limited to): human skulls and bones of all sorts - fibulas and tibias; tarsals and metatarsals; the dreaded phalanges - strange and potentially meaningless petroglyphs on the walls, stalactites drooping and dripping down from the ceiling, a can of Bush's® Baked Beans (opened, contents visibly rancid) perched atop one of the more prominent of the aforementioned human skulls, and there is what looks to be pocket lint all over the floor, huge tufts of lint that clump together to form jellyfish-like blobs that hover-puff their way around the floor of the aforementioned lair for a few seconds at a time with an eerie sort of sentience before disintegrating into the thick and musty aforementioned lair air.

There is no exit to the lair that you can see; otherwise you would have left it already. The whole thing is done up in stone. I can't tell you what sort of stone it is, other than to say it is solid, and gray, and stone-like in every way. And anyway, there are candles nestled here and there among the aforementioned stones, though they (the candles) are decidedly not the romantic sort of candles; neither are they votary candles - they are "spooky" candles - and anyway, there is some sort of half-bat/half-cat sitting upon an obviously bachelor-made spice rack nailed into the wall opposite, and the beast is sitting on its fuzzy little haunches, flexing its fuzzy little wings, perched there on the aforementioned bachelor-made spice rack, watching you.

But apart from the aforementioned half-bat/half-cat and the exorbitant amount of aforementionedly semi-sentient pocket lint on the floor, it is a fairly mundane, garden variety lair when all is said and done. Except for the man seated at the far end of the lair. You can't believe it took you three whole paragraphs to notice him, but then, you were too busy reading the three aforementioned paragraphs to notice much of anything else.

He (the man) is seated upon one of those swivel chairs you might purchase from officedepot.com (COUPON AVAILABLE on p. 522) if you were so inclined, and though he hasn't yet swiveled round to face you in his aforementioned swivel chair, you are nevertheless very much impressed by the rear view of his prodigious skull of hydrocephalic engorgement, and are all the more stunned when he finally does swivel around in his aforementioned swivel chair, affording you your first glimpse of the sublimely horrifying (or horrifyingly sublime) visage of the never-before-mentioned Lord Bulbous, Lizard King of the Laobans, the light of ten thousand suns radiating from the plutonium heat shield embedded in his mighty forehead ...

             
To continue reading I, BULBOUS, turn to page 2.

To stop reading I, BULBOUS, turn to page 3,957.