After winning a Pulitzer Prize for his 1992 short story collection of Vietnam-based stories, A Good Scent From A Strange Mountain, Robert Olen Butler followed it up with a collection of a dozen tales, Tabloid Dreams, based upon the sort of headlines ripped from the tabloid weekly newspapers one finds on checkout lines.

After a lackluster career as a novelist, Butler seemed to be verging on becoming a great writer for, even though A Good Scent From A Strange Mountain had its ups and downs, there were two or three genuinely great short stories.

The work in Tabloid Dreams, however, seems to manifest that A Good Scent From A Strange Mountain was an aberration, and Butler is merely a competent writer who lucked into the Pulitzer — one of the rare times in recent decades that the award was given to a worthwhile book.

Tabloid Dreams is a mediocre book, at best. The tales are basically all summed up by their titles-cum-conceits, and are told in the first person. Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed follows an Englishman after his death on the ship, and decades of his afterlife as part of the evaporation and rain cycle of water. He ends up trapped in a waterbed as a horny couple have sex, and thinks of a woman he fell in love with before the ship went down. He urges her to get in a lifeboat, and cannot get her out of his mind. It’s a solid tale, but much too long, although it does have a solid ending. 

In Woman Uses Glass Eye To Spy On Philandering Husband the tale starts off well, but Butler simply does not know how to end the tale, so it just sort of stops. It’s a very poor story, and little above the tabloid level it tries to spoof. 

Boy Born With Tattoo Of Elvis follows its lead character obsessing over how his peers will react to his freakish birthmark. There really is no point to this tale. Woman Loses Cookie Bake-Off, Sets Self On Fire has a nice conceit, and a solid end, but meanders a bit too much, as the lead character struggles with her own existence’s meaninglessness.

In Jealous Husband Returns In Form Of Parrot, a woman buys the reincarnation of her husband takes him home, where he watches her sex life with her new boyfriend, fixates on his human existence’s errors, his lust for her, and his inability to convert his still coherent thoughts beyond the usual parrotic squawks. In many ways this voyeurism is a pale echo of perhaps the best story in Scent, Love, so it unwittingly recapitulates- in its inferiority to the earlier tale, all the flaws this whole book has in relation to Butler’s earlier, superior book.

It also has a very bad ending, which is perhaps the greatest flaw in all the tales in this collection. Butler sets up the ideas in the tales with a brio, but builds no real three dimensional characters, so has no realistic ‘out’ from their predicaments to offer.