SOURCE: Stanford, Peter. “She Keeps an Eye on Her Man. It's In a Jar by His Bed.” London Observer (17 August 1997): 15.

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...