[In the following review, Stanford praises the “engrossing, amusing, highly polished” stories in Tabloid Dreams, but notes that the overall tone of the “ultimately unsettling” volume is poignant and tragic.]

My mother believes her own dead mother is watching her from beyond the grave. Grandma Fleming, she is convinced, has come back as the friendly magpie that is always sitting on the car in the drive, peering through the sitting room window. The family think it a crazy idea, but Robert Olen Butler will understand. He writes in Tabloid Dreams of a husband who comes back as a pet parrot to observe his widow as she sublimates her grief in a succession of lovers.

In Olen Butler's disorientating but oddly familiar world, all conventional boundaries are down; between humans and creatures, life and death, reality and the fanciful imaginings of tabloid headline writers. I couldn’t quite decide if this Pulitzer prize-winning author had assembled a series of classic Sunday Sport style headlines—‘Woman Struck by Car Turns Into Nymphomaniac,’ ‘Boy Born with Tattoo of Elvis’ and ‘JFK Secretly Attends Jackie Auction’—and then created whimsical, upside-down, occasionally dark-edged tales to accompany them, or whether the stories came first and then he gave them a final tabloid twist when it came to the title. Either way, the result is engrossing, amusing, highly polished, but ultimately unsettling.

Take the couple whose his and hers tales begin and end the collection. They bump into each other on that familiar meeting point of fiction, the promenade deck of the beleaguered Titanic, but that is where all precedents end. For the stiff, middle-aged ex-colonial civil servant recalling his version of events that fateful night is now a globule of water in a waterbed with a couple making love above him. His body drowned when the unsinkable ship sank, but his spirit has lived on as a droplet in the currents and tides of the world and has now washed up in a mattress.

With two bodies writhing sensually above him, this disembodied spirit recalls the moment on the Titanic when he helped into a lifeboat a woman he had only met minutes before. Their final, parting touch, of her hand on his crooked bow tie, was the key moment in his life, breaking the physical isolation that had hitherto afflicted him. Logic is abandoned as Olen Butler suggests that this once warm-blooded character was actually dead before that moment and is now, because of it, fully alive as an aquatic microblob.

The woman survives, but her take on that seminal event is told in the context of her floating out of time and place. She finally wakes as if from a dream and immerses herself in a bath, ending the collection of stories on an ambiguous note. Is this suicide or the first step in a hoped-for reunion under water with the spirit of the man whose memory haunts her?

Land-locked between this unhappy pair are a variety of strange creatures inhabiting the most ordinary of bodies—nine-year-old hit men, suburban housewives in love with spacemen or cookies, single mothers with loosely tied dressing gowns and a stream of grunting lovers, young women whose kiss spells death for men, and my favourite, Loretta, the court stenographer with a glass eye.

She suspects her husband of having an affair after he takes to washing their bed sheets. In a spin that characterises Olen Butler's ‘other’ perspective, she discovers she can see through this artificial eye, but only when it is taken out of her eye-socket. So one morning she leaves it in a jar next to her bed and, as she sits typing the court-room testimonies of acrimonious husbands and wives, she watches her partner bed a younger woman.

Olen Butler has a delicious sense of irony and pays lavish homage to the black humour of such outlandish tabloid-esque tales. Yet the prevailing tide of this collection is tragic. Sad, marginalised people wander through a landscape that is both mundane and topsy-turvy. They desire for escape, often via other people, into something other than the predictable constraints of this world.

But, as Olen Butler recognises the exploits with lashings of tenderness, such voyeurism has a bitter aftertaste. Hiding behind the headlines is the small print of a million, everyday, all-too-real tragedies—dysfunctional relationships, disappointments, loneliness, brutality and drudgery. ‘Broken Dreams’ might have been a better title, for they are the thread that binds these wacky, but poignant, stories.