Kelly is an instructor of literature and creative writing at College of Lake County and Oakton Community College in Des Plaines, Illinois. In this essay, Kelly looks at whether Butler tries too hard to avoid the sort of sensationalism that his story's title suggests.

Robert Olen Butler's 1996 short story collection Tabloid Dreams has a gimmick: each of the stories that it contains is based on a title that resembles the types of titles one finds in tabloid newspapers, the kind that shoppers thumb through while waiting in line at the supermarket. "Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover,""Boy Born with Tattoo of Elvis," and "Woman Struck by Car Turns into Nymphomaniac" are some of Butler's titles that could easily have been taken from the same weeklies that promise information about Bat Boy, aliens, and unlikely medical phenomena, all peppered with superlatives such as "amazing," "shocking," "mysterious," and...