Reviewed by Louis Greenstein
The Last Furies
by John Biscello
Lost Telegram Press
2025, ISBN: 978-1-0693011-7-8, Paperback, $24.99usd
https://losttelegrampress.ca/product/the-last-furies
John Biscello’s astonishing work, The Last Furies, is a vaudeville routine wrapped around a radio drama, tucked into a theater piece, bound by a screenplay, drawn into a rich and sprawling novel. Imagine a character in a play. What if they had an inner life outside of the script and the production itself? What if their suffering—beyond the boundaries of their fictional milieu—presented its own story? And what if, from a great distance, across a vast span of time, they could tap into the play in which they appear nightly by means of radio technology that doesn’t yet exist? What if the character dreamed like you and I dream and what if their dreams intersected with the dreams of other fictional characters, historical figures, and day-to-day people just living their lives? These stories are connected here through invisible filaments like radio waves encircling the globe, uniting disparate elements, people, and icons comprising a whole new story that touches on, informs, and reframes the old stories.
The Last Furies inhabits a shamanic, liminal world where fantasies, yearnings, and radio waves merge to reveal secrets of the universe and mysteries of the human consciousness. From surreal desertscapes inhabited by eccentric, masked residents; to tarot readings come alive with magicians, fools, and hermits; to the anxious musings of an amputee former poet listening to a radio broadcast about a play about an amputee former poet; to a Joan of Arc inspired suicide cult; to a Mexican shrine to a mystical recluse, Biscello takes the reader deeper and deeper into a lyrical, spectral world.
The story of the play within the novel serves as a bridge between an unsettling bardo and our own quotidian world—with our subconscious minds as the toll gate. This supernatural world is different from ours, yet close enough so that we can hold it up and begin to understand it, hear the voices, touch the hot desert, approach a distant shore, dive into the waves, grasp at truths untold, and follow the preternatural threads back to their source. Buckle up.
About the reviewer: Louis Greenstein is the author of the novels The Song of Life (Sunbury Press, 2021) and Mr. Boardwalk (New Door Books, 2014). He was the co-writer (with Kate Ferber) of One Child Born: The Music of Laura Nyro, a one-woman cabaret that had critically acclaimed productions at the New York Musical Festival, A.R.T.’s Oberon Theater in Boston, Joe’s Pub at the Public Theatre in New York, and in music venues and theaters in Philadelphia, Provincetown, Buffalo, Wilmington, and elsewhere. He also writes for television, and is a freelance magazine writer.