Deathless prose

This piece of deathless prose is worthy of winning a Bulwer-Lytton Award:

"Had it persevered - if awful chance had decreed that it escape from the quicksand as nightfall closed in over that foetid marsh, neither Colonel Jameson or Jim Tressidy or anybody in Horton's Crossing or camped in the adjacent hills would have survived to greet Lieutenant Wade Castro when, shortly after dawn the next day, he reported, red-eyed through lack of sleep, to the officer who had received instructions to accompany him in the spacious helicopter waiting on the hard-core, clambered aboard, took the ungainly seeming machine to tree-top level, and, half an hour later, brought it down skilfully in the deserted town's main street within yards of Sheriff Regan's office - just as Colonel Jameson had instructed."

-- Victor Norwood, 'Night of the Black Horror'
(Quoted in "Ghastly Beyond Belief", by Neil Gaiman.)

(Thanks to Mrs Impala for digging this one out for me.)