By Tom Osborne
Foozlers is a 24-hour “Odyssey” that runs a juggernaut through the high- and lowlands of Vancouver. Jerry Lowe is the reluctant driver of a getaway car for two sketchy junkies on the make. A pair of cops spend a shift wobbling on the cusp of total breakdown. The groom-to-be in an Indian arranged marriage seeks an escape of the carnal variety. Soon, they will all intersect paths with a gas station attendant and a very “special” car wash operator. And somebody’s got to do something about that noisy, bad-tempered cockatoo.
Foozlers chronicles that thin line between sane and insane behaviour, and the mayhem and unpredictability fuelled by the “Butterfly Effect”-strangers’ paths crossing for only an instant but having explosive effects. By story’s end, lives, or at least attitudes, will change. Sort of.
Praise for Foolzers
“Like Blaise Cendrars’ To the End of the World, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces and the whacked-out works of J.P. Donleavy, Terry Southern and William Burroughs, Foozlers is a madcap tour de force.”
—The Vancouver Sun
“irreverent, break-neck pace, and rollercoaster prose that’s a lot of fun to ride”
—Quill & Quire
“It’s a caper story with every element slightly off-kilter. And that’s the charm of [Foozlers] . . . . Read it and laugh.”
— RainReview.com
John Thomas Osborne, aka J.T. Osborne, was born on Baffin Island in June of 1949. He has illustrated various books, including Mary Beth Knechtel’s under-acknowledged The Goldfish That Exploded and Social Credit for Beginners: An Armchair Guide (Pulp Press, 1986). J.T. Osborne is also author of several books of poetry, including Under the Shadow of Thy Wings (1986), 9 Love Poems, and Please Wait for Attendant to Open Gate. His first novel Foozlers was published by Anvil Press in 2004 and was followed in 2006 by Dead Man in the Orchestra Pit (Anvil). Osborne grew up in Kamloops, B.C. and Vancouver, co-founded Pulp Press Book Publishers (now Arsenal Pulp) in the early 1970s, and currently resides in Maple Ridge, B.C.
