Doomsday Meteor Is Coming is better still, if only because it’s lighter and silly, and it ends ambivalently — as we do not know if the end truly is nigh, or not, but it’s nowhere near a tale that is resonant and will stick with a reader ten minutes after it’s read. Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover is a tale that was later expanded into a novel by Butler, although for what reason is unfathomable, as that tabloid grist- the alien abduction, gets a twist as abductor and abductee meet in a Wal-Mart parking lot. There are some mild tee-hees, but they cannot fill a short story, much less a novel.

In JFK Secretly Attends Jackie Auction, the still living ex-President goes to Sotheby’s auction house to voyeuristicly view his wife’s belongings. The tale is as banal as its premise, and ends very weakly.

The last tale, Titanic Survivors Found In Bermuda Triangle, is told from the point of view of the woman that the lead character from the first tale puts on the lifeboat. She is depressed, goes back to the moment of the ship’s sinking, and imagines her congress with the man who saved her. While the end is a good scene, Butler writes it in the most bathetic and banal fashion, which is emblemic of the whole book. The premises are thin, but a better writer would have deepened and truly ‘realized’ the characters more.

  Readers never connect with the leads because they are never real characters merely in outrageous scenarios. They are just puppets that ride the wave of the tales’ conceits- sort of third rate (at best) Twilight Zone episodes that lack depth and all end weakly.

  It is a truism that tales that start and end well can get away with muddled middles, but those that end badly can rarely be good, and never near greatness. Pulitzer Prize Winner Loses Touch And Becomes Third-Rate Pulp Fiction Hack may be an interesting enough title for a story- and one that would work well in this book, but as the reality embodied in a work of art it’s all too real, and all too depressing. Tabloid Dreams a profound disappointment for a writer with potential, and readers who are searching for real literature in this deliterate age.