We evaluate a range of recent LLMs on English creative writing, a
challenging and complex task that requires imagination, coherence, and
style. We use a difficult, open-ended scenario chosen to avoid training
data reuse: an epic narration of a single combat between Ignatius J.
Reilly, the protagonist of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Confederacy of
Dunces (1980), and a pterodactyl, a prehistoric flying reptile. We ask several
LLMs and humans to write such a story and conduct a human evalution
involving various criteria such as fluency, coherence, originality, humor, and
style. Our results show that some state-of-the-art commercial LLMs match
or slightly outperform our writers in most dimensions; whereas open-source
LLMs lag behind. Humans retain an edge in creativity, while humor shows a
binary divide between LLMs that can handle it comparably to humans and
those that fail at it. We discuss the implications and limitations of our study
and suggest directions for future research.