By: Dianne Reeves Angel

John Biscello’s No One Dreams in Color is one of those rare novels that feels less like a book you read than a dreamscape you wander through. From its opening pages, it casts a quiet, hypnotic spell — a meditation on grief, memory, and the strange ways art can anchor us when the world fractures.

The novel unfolds in interwoven threads that circle a small New Mexico town called Nine Peaks, a place that hums with mystery and sensuality – a mythical landscape where people literally disappear. At its center is Andrew, a young writer haunted by a nine-minute experimental film he saw as a teenager. For Andrew, the film became entwined with personal loss and the shaping of his rich interior life. The film was written and directed by Paul Kirby, a Nine Peaks artist who inexplicably disappears, prompting Andrew to journey there in search of the vanished filmmaker. The journey is both physical and deeply interior, a pilgrimage toward meaning and possibly enlightenment.

Running alongside Andrew’s story are glimpses into the lives of others — most memorably Ali, a young girl navigating adolescence through werewolf mythology, music, imagination, and ritual. Biscello captures the textures of youth with tenderness and precision: the soundtrack of cassette tapes, the freedom of a bicycle ride, the private mythologies we build to survive loneliness. There’s Callie and Jeremy, who work in the “Dream Bank,” peering into the dreams of others while failing to follow their own. These fascinating parallel narratives braid together into a portrait of a community suspended between dream and waking life. These characters carry the living echoes of Paul Kirby’s legacy. Andrew hopes that in this environment of dreams, mysticism, and sensuality, he will uncover the mystery of Paul Kirby, Nine Peaks, and even his own longings.

In one of the novel’s most powerful and revealing passages, Biscello writes, “I recalled what Mack had said about New York having a wendigo spirit all its own. In extending that concept, or widening its umbrella, you might say that Wendigo-psychosis was the corrosive rot at the foundational base of American culture and society. That progress was nothing more than progressive illness and spiritual deterioration. The wendigo was not just some horrific, ice-hearted creature that stalked winter woods of the north, but a poison and virus that circulated freely beyond the parameters of its designated geography.  And carried people into the dark inner sanctum of their own lonely winter woods.” It is a perfect time capsule of our era.

What distinguishes and elevates No One Dreams in Color is its luminous prose. Biscello writes with a poet’s attention to atmosphere and rhythm. Scenes unfold in fragments that accumulate emotional power, creating a mood that is at once wistful and electric. The novel moves comfortably between realism and dream logic, suggesting that our inner landscapes are as consequential as the places we inhabit.

This is not a novel driven by plot in the conventional sense. It is a book about sensation, perception, and the lingering afterimages of experience. Biscello invites readers to slow down and inhabit the spaces between events — the thresholds where memory, art, and longing converge. The result is a work that feels intimate and expansive at once.

No One Dreams in Color is a beautifully rendered exploration of how we carry loss, how we pursue the echoes of beauty, and how stories shape the contours of our lives. It is a novel to savor, to reread, and to linger long after the final page.