Tom Osborne provides a brief glossary at the end of his first novel, Foozlers. One might expect to find the meaning of foozler here, but it’s not necessary. Like the acrobatic adjectives that Tom Wolfe concocted for his hippie chronicle The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, foozler is a word that sounds like what it means – a word that defines itself. The same could be said of this first novel by one of the founders of Vancouver’s Pulp Publishing Company (now Arsenal Pulp Press).

The story takes place in Vancouver and revolves around an alcoholic drifter and his two heroin junkie friends who plot to steal a rare cockatoo from a pet store in order to score some cash for dope. After they snatch the bird, they’re overtaken by road rage, ram their VW bug – which they refer to simply as “the shitbox” – into a souped-up green Camaro, and pull over into a gas station to fight the three East Indian men in the car.

It’s a seemingly straightforward narrative, but Osborne shakes it up by replaying the day from the point of view of almost all of his characters, who include, among others; a young Indian man who’s being forced into an arranged marriage by his father; a retarded gas station attendant who sends cars through the wash with their windows open; and a racist cop working his last shift before a two-week vacation to Hawaii.

English grammar is thrown out the window with linear narrative structures, as Osborne sculpts his own form of the language: short sentences that frequently do not contain all the requirements to officially be called a sentence, arranged in a stream-of-consciousness order that represents the actual workings of his characters’ minds. The result is an irreverent, breakneck pace, and rollercoaster prose that’s a lot of fun to ride.

But every rollercoaster has that one big hill that you can see from miles away – the climax – and Foozlers’ is disappointing. The fight scene at the gas station, where all the separate stories converge, contains little action or dialogue, and what does happen is vague and unclear. Especially in the midst of all this revved-up prose, this central part of the story feels like a flat tire.