[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 now have. I’m fully conscious that I’m dead.” The voice belongs to a man who never really lived in his body, so did not regret its loss with the sinking of the Titanic. He says as much, remembering the night of his watery death.

All through that night, the fear was never physical. I didn’t mind so much, in point of fact, giving up a life in my body. The body was never a terribly interesting thing to me. Except perhaps to draw in the heavy curl of the smoke of my cigar, like a Hindu's rope in the market rising as if it were a thing alive. One needs a body to smoke a good cigar.

Bodiless, his purgatory involves making him understand what he lost. “And then I was rain, and the cycle began. And I moved in the clouds and in the tides and eventually I became rivers and streams and lakes and dew and a cup of tea. Darjeeling.”

The voice finally moves beyond tea water into a waterbed; above him, a couple makes love. He begins to understand the physical sensation he felt for another passenger, a woman he saved, on the last night of his life. “She stood there and she turned her face to me and I know now that she must have understood what it is to live in a body.”

One hundred sixty-five pages later, this anonymous woman passenger reappears to narrate the book's end story, “Titanic Survivors Found in Bermuda Triangle,” and she too remembers that night, the man with whom she spent those last hours. However, like him, she did not “understand what it is to live in a body”; she could not physically connect with him any more than he could with her. “My hand moved, it's true, my right hand rose as if by its own intent and it came out toward him and I ached to put my hand on some part of his body, to touch him—it is my ache now, too—touch his hand, at least, perhaps even his cheek, but I could not.”

She surmises that the foreign hotel room where she finds herself decades later—but no older—is her own version of the afterlife. She thinks, “Perhaps this is the purgatory for my betrayal, a place to show me that the words must be made flesh.” The book ends with her praying for his spirit to join hers as she descends, naked, into a cold bath. As the water rises up her thighs and over her breasts, the reader may safely conclude that the disembodied male voice of the first Titanic story is no longer trapped in a waterbed! (Lap, lap, lap. …) Oh, fluent, fluid Robert Olen thank you for Tabloid Dreams.