The Briscoe Situation

The Briscoe Situation is one of the more distinctive urban fantasies I have read, and it earns its Booky on Originality. The premise sits at an unusual junction. Julius Briscoe is a high-school-age psychic who reads people's "Status Buttons," a visual shorthand for mood and intention, and dispenses trademarked mind-effects: ZOMBIE MODE®, FEAR AND LOATHING®, PECKINPAH®, REAL TIME AMNESIA®. All of this sits inside a 1964 Philadelphia Jewish-mob milieu. Ettinger's best idea is the branding. Every power arrives with its own ®, and every catastrophic moment ends on the refrain "Never leave home without it." That turns supernatural violence into a grim consumer joke. It also gives Julius an inner voice that is flip and wounded at the same time.

The execution mostly honors the premise. Two set pieces show it at its best. On United Flight 505, Julius reads a plane full of Normals while four skyjackers and a squad of armed Mummers converge, and he resolves it with calibrated doses instead of brute force. At Wanamaker's, he freezes a whole monorail car to stop a heartbroken teen's murder-suicide, then realizes his "line-of-sight" assumption about his own power is wrong. Ettinger keeps raising the rules of his magic rather than resetting them. That is the sign of a system with real internal logic.

The human stakes are present throughout. Gracie Gold's death is the engine under every wisecrack. When Julius says "I thought I had it all figured out," and again when he muses that he feels "hollow inside, numb," the joking holds a genuine grief. The 1960s period detail, the Dylan and Airplane epigraphs, and the Marx-brothers naming jokes give the world atmosphere you could almost walk into.