SOURCE: Balée, Susan. “Days of Whine and Posers.” Hudson Review 50, no. 2 (summer 1997): 341-42.

In the following excerpt, Balée compliments the wit, originality, and distinctive characterizations in Tabloid Dreams, praising the work as a taut and fluid collection of stories.

Lucky (though red-eyed) reviewer: she finds Tabloid Dreams by Robert Olen Butler. Wow. Every story in this collection deserves a prize. Originality, humor, distinctive voices, drop-dead prose—Butler possesses all of these qualities, and he lends them to every story. This is the only collection of short fiction I read that didn’t have a flabby midsection. But, like Thon's collection, it scrutinized bodies galore. Butler is not immune to the collective unconscious, he simply does more with it.

The opening, “Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed,” begins with a disembodied voice floating in a strange body of water. “I’ve grown quite used to this existence I...