Woman Struck By Car Turns Into Nymphomaniac finds a New York Public Relations hack called a nymphomaniac by a tabloid, who gets revenge on the publication’s editor. There is no insight nor even humor in the tale. Butler is at his vapid, postmodern worst in this story. Here he does the typical PoMo schtick of dropping vapid pop cultural references that have already faded into obscurity. Note how a decade after the book’s publication so much of what is stated here is not relevant, and some as meaningless as the courtly intrigues off a John Dryden’s verse:

One day in spring I stepped into the crosswalk at Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street and perhaps I was distracted by the thought of the Jenny Jones show, wishing it was the Oprah show instead, but Oprah doesn’t do the real sleazy subjects, bless her pure and, for the moment, top-rated heart. So when your author is a Manhattan psychologist with a practice in masturbation therapy and a book called Touch Yourself, Cure Yourself, you take what you can get. In this case she was to be the resident expert on the I Have More Fun with Me than with My Partner segment.

  The tale then careens to its weak end, loaded with fetishism, but a well-worded last sentence that sums up the schizoid writing that the book is filled with. Note how vapidly the tale’s end is set up by banalities:

  And he went down, onto his knees, and he bent to me and he began to kiss my toes and I thank my gypsy cab driver for teaching me how pleasurable all that can be and my hand was on the meteor and I picked it up and it was very heavy, very heavy indeed, and its heaviness sent a thrill through me, a sweet wet thrill, and I looked down at the straight white part in his hair, the very place where this meteor was about to strike, and I thought how sexy. How truly sexy is the secret shape of a man’s brain.

  It’s a big comedown for both the tale, and its writer, but too typical of the stories in the book.

  But, he gets even worse in the next tale, Nine-Year Old Boy Is World’s Youngest Hitman. Yes, it’s about a preteen murderer, but it’s so unrealistic, and so filled with bad, cartoonish Brooklyn accents that it reads almost like an early Martin Scorsese film project that was rejected. Dialect writing almost always fails, and Butler’s lack of an ear for it, and lack of a real story, doom the reader of this dismal tale.

Every Man She Kisses Dies is a bit better, and has an almost Biblical resonance. Yet, the tale’s lead finds her ‘talent’ for death wastes away when she finds true love. What could have been a nice political commentary on the sexes and social-sexual relationships, however forced, instead descends into pabulum. The end, again, is execrable.