My Goat Ate Its Own Legs-Alex Bennett

My Goat Ate Its Own Legs
Alex Bennett
Harper, Jun 30 2009, $12.99
ISBN: 9780061719684

These thirty-one short shorts (none are more than fifteen pages) are entertaining and surprisingly several contain twists that will catch the reader off guard. None of the entries are clinkers, but a few are extremely profound about the “human” condition like “Dating Death” in which a suicide victim and Death begin seeing one another, Genghis Brown a rat of a species meeting the Prince of Darkness and “Anger Management” due to low levels of aggression. The title story is a stunner as the audience learns why the goat did what it did and its human owner did what he did afterward; but the kid only chomped himself to survive while his parents modestly but swiftly dine on their children as a gourmet delicacy. Irreverent yet relevant as even God has been divorced and Cyrano knows he has been put through a Bennett rinse cycle, fans who relish something different in their shorts (no pun intended as that would be to light for this collection), mostly humorous, but always hyperbolizing society with the uncanny dark stripping of the pompous. This is an odd winner, but best served over several weeks so the reader will be less likely to anticipate the mocking spins on human civilized society.

Harriet Klausner