Time Pressure by Spider Robinson begins with this sentence, then has a paragraph about how yes, it really was a dark and stormy night, and he's saying it even if it's cliche.

The opening narration to Animorphs #2 chapter 16 reads as follows:.

To her endless frustration, the UK publishers revised it to read 'It was a dark and stormy night in a small village in the United States.'

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle is a popular and critically acclaimed novel known for starting with the line.

The original: 'C'etait une nuit orageuse et sombre.'

Appears in some English translations of The Three Musketeers.

Later, Momma picks the perfect word ('The night was sultry', itself a Shout-Out to A Tale of Two Cities) which presses Larry's Berserk Button and causes him to declare quietly to Owen that he's getting up 'to kill the bitch'. Hilarity Ensues later when he finds out one of his literature students used the same phrase he did ('The night was humid').

Throw Momma from the Train begins with Larry Donner having massive writer's block, unable to get past 'The night was.' He discards such lame words as 'foggy', 'hot', even 'moist'.

In The Parent Trap (1998 version), it's heavily raining when Nicolas and Elizabeth say goodbye before she gets on a plane home.National Treasure begins with such a scene when the young Ben is talking to his grandfather.Double Subverted: 'It's true there were dark storm clouds, heavy, black and pendulous, towards which they were driving.'.

Subverted, of course, in the Rocky Horror Picture Show: 'It seemed a fairly ordinary night when Brad Majors and his fiancee Janet Weiss, two young, healthy, normal kids, left Denton to visit a Doctor Everett Scott, ex-tutor and now friend to both of them.' Though, how dark and stormy the night actually turns out later, can hardly be a matter of debate.In The Ollivander Children 's sequel, The Ollivanders at War, Calliope Ollivander notes at the start of one chapter that it should be a dark and stormy night, but she can't quite tell, being trapped underground.When Kyon realizes that Haruhi might end the world in Kyon: Big Damn Hero, he starts cursing the weather for not being dark and stormy.Chantal, a character in The Sandman has a dream which is a loop of a sailor telling a story that begins with 'It was a dark and stormy night.'.Detective Comics #500 turns Snoopy's short novel (see Newspaper Comics below) into a Batman story!.Not to be confused with the Larry Blamire film Dark and Stormy Night. Not to be confused with Hostile Weather or Stop-Motion Lighting. He is not publicly remembered as a writer or the inventor of those phrases-it is his Purple Prose phrase that lives on.ДЄ Sub-Trope of Weather Report Narration. In fact, two yearly writing contests are held in Lytton's honour.Д®dward Bulwer-Lytton was three things-an author, the inventor of such popular phrases as 'the pen is mightier than the sword', 'the great unwashed' and 'the pursuit of the almighty dollar', and possibly a proto-Nazi. The phrase has been so thoroughly mocked and re-used it should be a Dead Horse Trope if it were not an Undead Horse Trope: it's just too much fun. Thanks to the power of lightning, opening on a stormy night scene or at least featuring one had been a Horror trope since Universal's Frankenstein and before. Edward Bulwer-Lytton is remembered for the phrase 'It Was A Dark And Stormy Night', which has become a touchstone for convoluted Purple Prose and campfire Ghost Stories.

The perfect stormy torrent