My Goat Ate Its Own Legs by Alex Burrett

The Moment: You fly your freak flag at half-mast

by Patrick Rapa

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Published: Jun 9, 2009

by Alex Burrett

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Alex Burrett is weird, just not as weird as he thinks he is. The entertaining debut collection of short (sometimes really short) stories by this British advertising exec never misses an opportunity for cartwheeling, hand-springing dollar-store fabulism. A woman dates Death. The devil opens hell up to tourism. A rat talks about being a rat.

Sometimes these "tales for adults" (as the book is subtitled) and their expository titles read like half-fables in search of a moral they'll never find — unless you count "goats will eat anything." Even their own legs? Yep.

Occasionally, the zaniness parts and there's a dark, dry moment of George Saunders-esque calm, as in "Utter Beauty Paint," a quasi-essay on a substance that makes things look pretty no matter what. Only, where Saunders would've tied the concept to a plot or a point, Burrett is pleased to let it loose as a mere thought exercise, charming for its inventiveness and lack of ambition.

Charm carries the day for My Goat Ate Its Own Legs. Burrett's lone narrator — you'd be hard-pressed to differentiate one storyteller's voice from the next — is a likable, overly enthusiastic dude. He's not too sharp. He uses exclamation points and interrupts one tale to squeeze in an unrelated one. He's a lot of fun, really.

He does have an annoying predilection toward distended, redundant sentences. And some ideas are stripped bare when the plot and the pace might've been better served by mystery or restraint. But if you grade these "tales" on a curve, looking at them not as overserious pieces of literature but the ramblings of a hyper and lovable drunk, you'll enjoy it more. And the moments of genuine imagination will be a pleasant surprise.

Harper Perennial, 256 pp., $12.99, June 30

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