The Boy Who Ate Around

A fantasy as delicious as it is malicious introduces raving and ravenous eaters, to wit, the tentacled ``bug-eyed slime slusher'' and ``fire-breathing tyrannosaurus rat.'' (Rest assured that these creatures look even weirder than their names suggest.) Served a dinner of string beans and cheese souffle, a boy named Mo sees instead a bowl of worms topped with a googly-eyed bullfrog head. Thoroughly dismayed, Mo metamorphoses into a ``ferocious green warthog monster'' and ``eats around'' the disgusting dish-i.e., devours everything else. After gobbling up parents and house, Mo-monster No. 1 removes his own head, and out of his body steps a larger ``pink-eyed alligator chirper'' who chows upon Mo's hometown. Subsequent entities munch the White House, the U.S. and finally the earth; collage elements including tiny buildings and exotic postage stamps indicate cities and towns. Only Mo's grotesque souffle remains untouched. Drescher (Pat the Beastie) draws with a delicate hand, yet his near-omnivorous creations are anything but subtle, and Mo himself has the limp appearance of a ventriloquist's dummy. In balance, however, this gleefully weird picture book finds the redemptive comedy in an all-too-familiar dinner-table disaster. Ages 4-8. (Oct.)