Customer Reviews

Tabloid Dreams: Stories

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Robert Olen Butler has put together a collection of fantastic stories fashioned from the headlines of tabloid magazines in Tabloid Dreams. The cover alone would prompt a would-be reader to pick the book up and flip through its pages. Disbelief turns to compassion as the reader takes a walk in the lives of Butler's extraordinary, but yet strangely ordinary, characters. The titles of the stories are directly quoted from tabloid headlines, but the stories are not the sensationalism that one would expect from a book with "tabloid" in the title. Butler weaves his stories with amazing care and towards the end of the book the reader begins to notice startling similarities between all of Butler's unusual characters. A boy born with a tattoo of Elvis shows us a glimpse into the life of the Elvis we 'think' we know, and a woman who catches her cheating husband with her glass eye learns a hard lesson. From a Titanic survivor trapped in a waterbed to a dead husband brought back as a pet bird, the reader ceases to see freaks and begins to see real people with feelings and emotions. The most startling thing about the book is that readers may actually find themselves identifying with the characters and after finishing Tabloid Dreams may also find themselves looking at humanity with a new attitude and a slightly askew view. Picking up a tabloid in the supermarket may not be a joke anymore

In this collection of short stories, Butler leaves (for once it seems) his experices of Vietnam behind and writes what can only be considered a series of fun and funny stories. If you are looking for deep, thought-provoking literature, read one of his other works, but if you are looking for a fun collection written by a great writer--Tabloid Dreams is for you. People look down on this collection because it isn't as poignant or "intellectual" as some of his other works...but who cares? It's fun...a great read.

"Tabloid Dreams" is like the sit-com version of the works of Edgar Allen Poe. There are so many dead bodies by the time we get to the end of the collection that we marvel at all the different ways they've died. In "Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed," we see an Englishman who falls in love if only for a moment on the deck of the Titanic and urges the lady to get into a lifeboat and live. He dies and has numerous observations on life as he wafts around in a ghostly existence. The collection concludes perfectly as with bookends with the same incident told through the eyes of the woman in "Titanic Survivors Found in Bermuda Triangle." After having gotten into the lifeboat and mysteriously slept decades before rescue, she decides life really isn't worth living and offs herself in a bathtub. We see a widow who enters a cookie baking contest and sets her apron on fire, a parrot who is the reincarnation of his wife's dead husband fly into a window, a nymphomaniac put a meteor through a guy's brain who is busy kissing her feet, a nine-year old hit man who leaves a trail of bodies, a woman with a death kiss whose lovers drown, get baseballs smashing their brain or die in auto crashes, JFK who wasn't killed at an auction of Jackie's belongings who did die, and the whole planet gets blown up when struck by a meteor. 2 stories do not have dead bodies like the boy with the tatoo of Elvis and the court reporter with a glass eye who puts it in a glass of water to spy on her husband having an affair; but they probably would have liked to kill someone! Butler does a great job of making us look at the world from a different perspective. This collection is delightfully offbeat and original. Enjoy!

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 at supermarkets. 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....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.

A far cry from his poignant stories about Vietnamese immigrants in "Good Scent from a Strange Mountain" Butler's latest collection tells the stories behind the headlines we all love to make fun of. Be it marriage to a space alien, a glass eye spying on a cheating spouse for its owner, or the soul of a Titanic passenger being discovered in a couple's waterbed; these stories are a collection of wacky/sad/funny/creepy tales that are a must-read for any short story connoisseur.
Ray Schmitz III

I was surprised to read some other readers' negative reviews of this book, because I think it's one of the very best short fiction collections I have ever read. But there's no accounting for personal taste, I suppose.
These stories are linked together by a common device --all are based on (real or imagined?) tabloid headlines. Some other readers have felt this is phony and contrived, but I don't see why. You only have to read a couple paragraphs of the first story to realize that Butler's stories transcend and subvert the genre of the supermarket tabloid. These are exquisitely crafted, character-driven stories. Sure, the titles promise a superficial laugh, but the tales themselves portray the deepest joys, hopes, fears and angst of the human condition. That is the irony of the somewhat slapstick titles; the stories are funny in parts, but not in the least bit fluffy.
It occurs to me that maybe it was the use of such "low culture" references as tabloid headlines that made some readers hate this book. Perhaps those readers who pride themselves on reading highbrow literature (Butler is, after all, a Pullitzer prize winner) are offended by any allusions to "baser" forms of writing.
In any case, I recommend this collection to anyone who enjoys good writing, is not a snob, and has a sense of humor. The writing is masterful, the characters are outlandish but fascinating and, for the most part, believable, and the stories themselves are alternately hilarious and heart-breaking. Trust me --this book rocks.

Here you find a long awaited answer to the question, "Does anybody really read this stuff?". There is no doubt - everyone has a dream to connect him to the realm of the unbelievable. Butler makes the connection. Every copy of his latest book should include a cassette of his interview on 'Bookworm' (NPR, Sunday 2/9/97

This collection of short stories is one of the most poignant pieces of modern literature I have ever read. It explores the idea of connecting with your fellow man in an age that is hell-bent on separation. It begins with the story "Titanic Victim Speaks Through Water Bed;" a story about a man who realizes the importance of having a physical being, only after he loses it, and ends with the tale of a "Titanic Survivor Found In Bermuda Triangle." This is the story of a woman who has devoted her life to one cause, and when that cause is gone, she sees that her ceaseless devotion has left her empty and unfulfilled. This collection speaks to all the hopes and fears that live deep within ourselves. After all, who wants to reflect on their life and see that it has all come to nothing? After reading this book, if you do not have a deeper appreciation for your friends and family, you have missed the point entirely. Make that connection and live your life with no regrets.

Tabloid Dreams provides refreshing tales of ordinary people in their ordinary lives when the quirky and unusual comes knocking at the door. I'd recommend this for anyone who wants something a little different from the rest.

If someone else (no names, please) had not already appropriated "a heartbreaking work of staggering genius" for the title of his book, that's exactly how I'd describe this collection of short stories. Never mind the apparent hubris of a twenty-one-year-old (no names, please) describing his own book with a title that sounds more like the chant of a groupie. I guess if you can found a literary empire, call it "McSweeney's," and have everyone tripping over themselves bi-coastally to get invited to the party, you can title your book any goddamned thing you like.

But I digress. The subject is "Tabloid Dreams," and the author is one Robert Olen Butler. I don't remember when I last read a collection of stories that packed so much imagination, so much stylistic virtuosity, so much sheer reading pleasure between two covers. Bob won a Pulitzer for Literature a few years back. He clearly deserved it.

I'm not a Butler groupie, but I AM decidedly a Butler fan. If time and money were no object, I'd buy the lot of what Robert Olen Butler has written and count myself a rich man. As it is, I have to content myself with this one collection until the economy turns around. Between now and then, I can only hope that Butler will add to his opus -- and that I'll have even more to choose from once we emerge from the present doom and gloom.

If you've never read Robert Olen Butler, I couldn't recommend a better place to start than "Tabloid Dreams." It'll bring some sunshine into your deepest, darkest daydreams.