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Nightmare Alley
Stan Carlisle, employé dans une tournée foraine, médite en assistant au numéro d’un geek, affreux poivrot qui décapite les poulets d’un coup de dents. Jamais il ne descendra aussi bas, jamais ! Jeune et séduisant, Stan nourrit de grandes ambitions et n’a aucun scrupule. Sa rencontre avec Lilith, psy blonde, implacable et glaciale, marque le tournant de sa carrière. L’heure est venue de berner les riches en convoquant leurs chers disparus dans des demeures cossues. Mais le Dr Lilith a percé à jour les nombreuses failles de Stan le Magnifique…
Nourri de psychanalyse et inspiré par le tarot, Nightmare Alley est un roman cruel et hallucinant, devenu culte dès sa parution à la fin des années 1940.
Nourri de psychanalyse et inspiré par le tarot, Nightmare Alley est un roman cruel et hallucinant, devenu culte dès sa parution à la fin des années 1940.
464 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1946
655 people are currently reading
14171 people want to read
About the author
William Lindsay Gresham
23 books100 followersWilliam Lindsay Gresham (August 20, 1909 – September 14, 1962) was an American novelist and non-fiction author particularly regarded among readers of noir. His best-known work is Nightmare Alley (1946), which was adapted into a 1947 film starring Tyrone Power.
Gresham was born in Baltimore, Maryland. As a child, he moved to New York with his family, where he became fascinated by the sideshow at Coney Island. Upon graduating from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn in 1926, Gresham drifted from job to job, and worked as a folk singer in Greenwich Village. In 1937, Gresham served as a volunteer medic for the Loyalist forces during the Spanish Civil War. There, he befriended a former sideshow employee, Joseph Daniel "Doc" Halliday, and their long conversations inspired much of his work, particularly Gresham's two books about the American carnival, the nonfiction Monster Midway and the fictional Nightmare Alley.
Returning to the United States in 1939, after a troubling period that involved a stay in a tuberculosis ward and a failed suicide attempt, Gresham found work editing true crime pulp magazines. In 1942, Gresham married Joy Davidman, a poet, with whom he had two children, David and Douglas Gresham. Gresham was an abusive, unfaithful, and alcoholic husband. Davidman, although born Jewish, became a fan of the writings of C.S. Lewis, which led eventually to her conversion to Christianity. Davidman eventually fled her marriage to Gresham and later married Lewis, their relationship forming the inspiration for the play and movie Shadowlands.
Gresham married Davidman's first cousin, Renee Rodriguez, with whom he had been having an affair and who was herself suffering an abusive marriage. Gresham joined Alcoholics Anonymous and developed a deep interest in Spiritualism, having already exposed many of the fraudulent techniques of popular spiritualists in his two sideshow-themed books and having authored a book about Houdini with the assistance of noted skeptic James Randi. He was also an early enthusiast of Scientology but later denounced the religion as another kind of spook racket.
In 1962, Gresham's health began to take a turn for the worse. He had started to go blind and had been diagnosed with cancer of the tongue. On September 14, 1962, he checked into the Dixie Hotel — which he had often frequented while writing Nightmare Alley over a decade earlier. There, 53 year old Gresham took his life with an overdose of sleeping pills. His death went generally unnoticed by the New York press, but for a mention by a bridge columnist.
Gresham was born in Baltimore, Maryland. As a child, he moved to New York with his family, where he became fascinated by the sideshow at Coney Island. Upon graduating from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn in 1926, Gresham drifted from job to job, and worked as a folk singer in Greenwich Village. In 1937, Gresham served as a volunteer medic for the Loyalist forces during the Spanish Civil War. There, he befriended a former sideshow employee, Joseph Daniel "Doc" Halliday, and their long conversations inspired much of his work, particularly Gresham's two books about the American carnival, the nonfiction Monster Midway and the fictional Nightmare Alley.
Returning to the United States in 1939, after a troubling period that involved a stay in a tuberculosis ward and a failed suicide attempt, Gresham found work editing true crime pulp magazines. In 1942, Gresham married Joy Davidman, a poet, with whom he had two children, David and Douglas Gresham. Gresham was an abusive, unfaithful, and alcoholic husband. Davidman, although born Jewish, became a fan of the writings of C.S. Lewis, which led eventually to her conversion to Christianity. Davidman eventually fled her marriage to Gresham and later married Lewis, their relationship forming the inspiration for the play and movie Shadowlands.
Gresham married Davidman's first cousin, Renee Rodriguez, with whom he had been having an affair and who was herself suffering an abusive marriage. Gresham joined Alcoholics Anonymous and developed a deep interest in Spiritualism, having already exposed many of the fraudulent techniques of popular spiritualists in his two sideshow-themed books and having authored a book about Houdini with the assistance of noted skeptic James Randi. He was also an early enthusiast of Scientology but later denounced the religion as another kind of spook racket.
In 1962, Gresham's health began to take a turn for the worse. He had started to go blind and had been diagnosed with cancer of the tongue. On September 14, 1962, he checked into the Dixie Hotel — which he had often frequented while writing Nightmare Alley over a decade earlier. There, 53 year old Gresham took his life with an overdose of sleeping pills. His death went generally unnoticed by the New York press, but for a mention by a bridge columnist.
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September 30, 2018
“How helpless they all looked in the ugliness of sleep. A third of life spent unconscious and corpselike. And some, the great majority, stumbled through their waking hours scarcely more awake, helpless in the face of destiny. They stumbled down a dark alley toward their deaths. They sent exploring feelers into the light and met fire and writhed back again into the darkness of their blind groping.”
Stan Carlisle is an ambitious man looking for a way to make the big score. He is working for a ten and one carnival show. He is having sex with the married fortune teller with lustful intent, but also because she has a book outlining an act that will put him in the big money.
“Oh, Christ, why do you have to grow up into a life like this one? Why do you ever have to want women, want power, make money, make love, keep up a front, sell the act, suck around some booking agent, get gypped on the check—?”
All people want some or all of those things, but most people aren’t in the hurry that Stan is to achieve those things. Short-cut Stan would be a very appropriate nickname. He wants all those possessions, but without working hard to get them. And he wants them NOW.
“Nothing matters in this goddamned lunatic asylum of a world but dough.”
He is a quick study and learns the routine quickly, basically it allows an assistant in the crowd to convey a question that a rube has asked to the conjurer on stage by subtle, imperceptible motions. Stan can then act like those questions have been sent to him mentally from someone in the crowd. He has the perfect assistant in mind, Molly the electric girl. When a cop is about to arrest Molly for indecent exposure, Stan steps in and uses the insights about people that he has been learning from Zeena, the fortune teller, to convince the cop that Stan knows his life story. It is a gift for sure, almost on par with Sherlock Holmes, to notice things about people such as the location of calluses on their hands or the condition of their clothes showing a woman’s touch, and most importantly watching their faces. As Stan shares his astute best guesses their reactions will tell you if you are hot or cold.
Molly now owes him.
”Stan, honey, you do love me--don’t you?”
“Sure I do, baby.”
“And you won’t tell a soul. Promise me you won’t tell. Because I never let any man do it to me before, honest.”
“Are you sure?” Stan thrilled at his power over her. He wanted to hear her voice with fear in it.
“Yes, honey. Yes. Honest. You hurt me something terrible at first. You know--”
“Yes.”
“Darling, if I’d ever done it before you wouldn’t have hurt me. Only I’m glad you hurt me, honey. I’m glad. Because you were the first.”
Stan understands the power of fear. He learned it from watching the sideshow geek.
”The geek was made by fear. He was afraid of sobering up and getting the horrors. But what made him a drunk? Fear. Find out what they are afraid of and sell it back to them. That’s the key. The key!”
Well Molly is only the first of many to hand the key to Stan.
There is a 1947 movie based on this book that is supposed to be really good, but I’ve not had a chance to see it yet.
Stan gains confidence and keeps adding more and more splendor to his shows. He sends away through the mail for a spiritual ministry certificate that allows him to call himself Reverend Carlisle. Add some religion to the mystery and suddenly you have a potent combination just made for milking money out of rubes, but more importantly for Stan someone more substantial with a guilty conscious.
Stan hooks up with Lilith, a psychologist. ”The gray eyes seemed as big as saucers, like the eyes of a kitten when you hold its nose touching yours. He looked at the small mouth, the full lower lip, carefully tinted but not painted. She said nothing. As he started to push past her he seemed to fall; he found his arm around her and held on knowing that he was a fool, knowing something terrible would strike him dead, knowing he wanted to cry, to empty his bladder, to scream, to go to sleep, wondering as he tightened his arm around her….
Stan thinks Lilith can be usefully to him. She knows things. Just like a cat she is hot and cold with her affections keeping Stan off balance just as he feels he is gaining control.
”You’ve got enough stuff in that bastard tin file cabinet to blow ‘em all up. I know what you’ve got in there--society dames with the clap, bankers that take it up the ass, actresses that live on hop, people with idiot kids. You’ve got it all down. If I had that stuff I’d give ‘em cold readings that would have ‘em crawling on their knees to me.”
Stan forgets not everyone other than himself is a rube. Lilith thinks he might be useful too. Who figures out who is playing who is the wild ride to the finish.
William Lindsay Gresham wrote two books about the carnival. Besides this novel he wrote a nonfiction book titled Monster Midway. He grew up in New York and while living there he developed a fascination with the sideshow acts on Coney Island. After a failed suicide attempt in 1939 he started editing true crime magazines, got married, and had kids. He became a raging alcoholic, abusive husband, and a unreliable father. As Nick Tosches mentions in the forward to this edition alcohol plays a prominent part in this novel.
”Nothing worth reading was ever written by anyone who was drunk while writing it; but Nightmare Alley evinces every sign that its writing was binge-riddled. Booze is so strong an element in the novel that it can almost be a character, an essential presence like Fates in ancient Greek tragedy. The delirium tremens writhe and strike in this book like the snakes within.
The vernacular, the drinking, the knife edged dialogue, the scheming, the drinking, the deceptions, the slang, the naked ambition, the callousness, the greed, the exploitation, the fear and the the the…”Dream. Nightmare. Delusion. Nothing...nothing real. Tongue...naked...talk...money...dream...nightmare.”.
There are no softboiled moments in this book. Gresham kept it hardboiled all the way. This is certainly one of the best examples of 1940s noir that I’ve read. For all the flamboyancy of the topic the novel comes across as real. By the end, this reader, was convinced that these characters walked and breathed in real life. Gresham looked into his own gray-tinged soul and found the darkest deeds and wet eyed desires and put them on paper.
Unfortunately in 1962 Gresham lost the battle with himself and took his own life. I hope he found the peace that his life never gave him.
William Lindsay Gresham
”We suck, we chew, we swallow, we lick, we try to mash life into us like an am-am-amocha God damn it! Somebody lets us loose like a toad out of a matchbox and we jump and jump and jump and the guy always behind us and when he gets tired he stomps us to death and our guts squirt out on each side of the boot of All Merciful Providence. The Son-of-a- bitch!”
**********************4.25 stars*********************
Stan Carlisle is an ambitious man looking for a way to make the big score. He is working for a ten and one carnival show. He is having sex with the married fortune teller with lustful intent, but also because she has a book outlining an act that will put him in the big money.
“Oh, Christ, why do you have to grow up into a life like this one? Why do you ever have to want women, want power, make money, make love, keep up a front, sell the act, suck around some booking agent, get gypped on the check—?”
All people want some or all of those things, but most people aren’t in the hurry that Stan is to achieve those things. Short-cut Stan would be a very appropriate nickname. He wants all those possessions, but without working hard to get them. And he wants them NOW.
“Nothing matters in this goddamned lunatic asylum of a world but dough.”
He is a quick study and learns the routine quickly, basically it allows an assistant in the crowd to convey a question that a rube has asked to the conjurer on stage by subtle, imperceptible motions. Stan can then act like those questions have been sent to him mentally from someone in the crowd. He has the perfect assistant in mind, Molly the electric girl. When a cop is about to arrest Molly for indecent exposure, Stan steps in and uses the insights about people that he has been learning from Zeena, the fortune teller, to convince the cop that Stan knows his life story. It is a gift for sure, almost on par with Sherlock Holmes, to notice things about people such as the location of calluses on their hands or the condition of their clothes showing a woman’s touch, and most importantly watching their faces. As Stan shares his astute best guesses their reactions will tell you if you are hot or cold.
Molly now owes him.
”Stan, honey, you do love me--don’t you?”
“Sure I do, baby.”
“And you won’t tell a soul. Promise me you won’t tell. Because I never let any man do it to me before, honest.”
“Are you sure?” Stan thrilled at his power over her. He wanted to hear her voice with fear in it.
“Yes, honey. Yes. Honest. You hurt me something terrible at first. You know--”
“Yes.”
“Darling, if I’d ever done it before you wouldn’t have hurt me. Only I’m glad you hurt me, honey. I’m glad. Because you were the first.”
Stan understands the power of fear. He learned it from watching the sideshow geek.
”The geek was made by fear. He was afraid of sobering up and getting the horrors. But what made him a drunk? Fear. Find out what they are afraid of and sell it back to them. That’s the key. The key!”
Well Molly is only the first of many to hand the key to Stan.
There is a 1947 movie based on this book that is supposed to be really good, but I’ve not had a chance to see it yet.
Stan gains confidence and keeps adding more and more splendor to his shows. He sends away through the mail for a spiritual ministry certificate that allows him to call himself Reverend Carlisle. Add some religion to the mystery and suddenly you have a potent combination just made for milking money out of rubes, but more importantly for Stan someone more substantial with a guilty conscious.
Stan hooks up with Lilith, a psychologist. ”The gray eyes seemed as big as saucers, like the eyes of a kitten when you hold its nose touching yours. He looked at the small mouth, the full lower lip, carefully tinted but not painted. She said nothing. As he started to push past her he seemed to fall; he found his arm around her and held on knowing that he was a fool, knowing something terrible would strike him dead, knowing he wanted to cry, to empty his bladder, to scream, to go to sleep, wondering as he tightened his arm around her….
Stan thinks Lilith can be usefully to him. She knows things. Just like a cat she is hot and cold with her affections keeping Stan off balance just as he feels he is gaining control.
”You’ve got enough stuff in that bastard tin file cabinet to blow ‘em all up. I know what you’ve got in there--society dames with the clap, bankers that take it up the ass, actresses that live on hop, people with idiot kids. You’ve got it all down. If I had that stuff I’d give ‘em cold readings that would have ‘em crawling on their knees to me.”
Stan forgets not everyone other than himself is a rube. Lilith thinks he might be useful too. Who figures out who is playing who is the wild ride to the finish.
William Lindsay Gresham wrote two books about the carnival. Besides this novel he wrote a nonfiction book titled Monster Midway. He grew up in New York and while living there he developed a fascination with the sideshow acts on Coney Island. After a failed suicide attempt in 1939 he started editing true crime magazines, got married, and had kids. He became a raging alcoholic, abusive husband, and a unreliable father. As Nick Tosches mentions in the forward to this edition alcohol plays a prominent part in this novel.
”Nothing worth reading was ever written by anyone who was drunk while writing it; but Nightmare Alley evinces every sign that its writing was binge-riddled. Booze is so strong an element in the novel that it can almost be a character, an essential presence like Fates in ancient Greek tragedy. The delirium tremens writhe and strike in this book like the snakes within.
The vernacular, the drinking, the knife edged dialogue, the scheming, the drinking, the deceptions, the slang, the naked ambition, the callousness, the greed, the exploitation, the fear and the the the…”Dream. Nightmare. Delusion. Nothing...nothing real. Tongue...naked...talk...money...dream...nightmare.”.
There are no softboiled moments in this book. Gresham kept it hardboiled all the way. This is certainly one of the best examples of 1940s noir that I’ve read. For all the flamboyancy of the topic the novel comes across as real. By the end, this reader, was convinced that these characters walked and breathed in real life. Gresham looked into his own gray-tinged soul and found the darkest deeds and wet eyed desires and put them on paper.
Unfortunately in 1962 Gresham lost the battle with himself and took his own life. I hope he found the peace that his life never gave him.
William Lindsay Gresham
”We suck, we chew, we swallow, we lick, we try to mash life into us like an am-am-amocha God damn it! Somebody lets us loose like a toad out of a matchbox and we jump and jump and jump and the guy always behind us and when he gets tired he stomps us to death and our guts squirt out on each side of the boot of All Merciful Providence. The Son-of-a- bitch!”
**********************4.25 stars*********************
January 16, 2021
This is a vintage cult classic noir set in New York, which is receiving contemporary attention with the upcoming film release of the novel by William Lindsay Gresham, directed by Guillermo del Toro. Stanton 'Stan' Carlisle is a young carny, ruthless, ambitious, clever, manipulative man who has no intention of ever allowing himself to sink to the level of the carnival's freaks and the alcoholic 'geek' drawing the sneering attention, ire and contempt of the crowds. This dark, disturbing and sleazy atmospheric tale is structured by chapters named after Tarot cards, all pulling relentlessly and inexorably towards a preordained fate, the rise and fall of Stan, unscrupulous, amoral, abusive, frantic in his desire to acquire a fortune, understanding that fear is the key.
He is a quick learner when picking up the skills of a mentalist from Zeena, aided by a assistant, with a keen observant eye, paying attention to details and psychology, that appear to confer almost magical powers with which to swindle, deceive and con the gullible, desperate and the vulnerable. He leaves the carnival with Molly, the electric girl, with more morals than him, chasing bigger dreams that see him turning into the exploitative spiritualist preacher, Reverend Carlisle, turning to the demon drink to cope, uncaring of anyone around him. Amidst the increasing sense of dread and doom, he meets the beautiful Lilith, a psychologist he seriously underestimates, who draws his attention to a wealthy mark, only for his life to spiral out of control, a broken man and for his life nightmarishly turning full circle.
Gresham's Depression era novel carries the type of authentic descriptions, for example, of the carnival and its acts, of a writer that knows intimately of what he depicts, in all its bleak horrors and insights. This is an intensely engaging and twisted read, with an underlying dark sense of humour, and great characters, that will appeal to readers who love their noir. After reading this, I am looking forward to seeing del Toro's interpretation of this complex novel. Many thanks to Bloomsbury.
He is a quick learner when picking up the skills of a mentalist from Zeena, aided by a assistant, with a keen observant eye, paying attention to details and psychology, that appear to confer almost magical powers with which to swindle, deceive and con the gullible, desperate and the vulnerable. He leaves the carnival with Molly, the electric girl, with more morals than him, chasing bigger dreams that see him turning into the exploitative spiritualist preacher, Reverend Carlisle, turning to the demon drink to cope, uncaring of anyone around him. Amidst the increasing sense of dread and doom, he meets the beautiful Lilith, a psychologist he seriously underestimates, who draws his attention to a wealthy mark, only for his life to spiral out of control, a broken man and for his life nightmarishly turning full circle.
Gresham's Depression era novel carries the type of authentic descriptions, for example, of the carnival and its acts, of a writer that knows intimately of what he depicts, in all its bleak horrors and insights. This is an intensely engaging and twisted read, with an underlying dark sense of humour, and great characters, that will appeal to readers who love their noir. After reading this, I am looking forward to seeing del Toro's interpretation of this complex novel. Many thanks to Bloomsbury.
February 12, 2022
Rounded up from around 2.5 stars ⭐️
Nightmare alley follows the rise and fall of Stan Carlisle. Starting off in a Carnival, Stan wants to better himself and he uses his imagination and cunning to do so. But can he keep himself at the top?
I want to start by saying that there were many things I enjoyed about this book. I loved the unique characters. The carnival chapters were my favourite in the whole novel, they were so vivid and I couldn’t put the book down! Unfortunately for me, it went a little downhill from there. I found Gresham’s writing difficult to follow at times. Some of the sentences were overly long and complicated and I found myself reading them over and over to try and make sense of them.
I didn’t like Stan, although you are not meant to. But it wasn’t the same abhorrence I’ve experienced with other books. I went into this expecting something extremely dark. Unfortunately for me it just did not live up to the darkness of previous novels I have read. I found myself constantly comparing it to them, and it just fell short. However, just because it wasn’t dark enough for me does not mean it won’t be dark for other people. Please approach this book with caution as there are some possible triggers. Towards the end I found myself feeling confused by the storyline, I’m still not really sure what happened. I do still hope to watch the film, maybe that will shed some light on things for me. That being said, I loved that each chapter was linked to a different tarot card, it was so unique! I also found the short excerpt about the author really interesting. If you’ve been wanting to read this please do not let me put you off, many people seem to love it! I would definitely consider reading it again after I’ve seen the movie.
I would recommend this to anyone who likes dark thriller/crime novels. Please be aware of possible trigger warnings and some of the language of the time may be offensive to some. I want to thank Netgalley and Bloomsbury publishing for allowing me to read this book and give my personal thoughts.
Nightmare alley follows the rise and fall of Stan Carlisle. Starting off in a Carnival, Stan wants to better himself and he uses his imagination and cunning to do so. But can he keep himself at the top?
I want to start by saying that there were many things I enjoyed about this book. I loved the unique characters. The carnival chapters were my favourite in the whole novel, they were so vivid and I couldn’t put the book down! Unfortunately for me, it went a little downhill from there. I found Gresham’s writing difficult to follow at times. Some of the sentences were overly long and complicated and I found myself reading them over and over to try and make sense of them.
I didn’t like Stan, although you are not meant to. But it wasn’t the same abhorrence I’ve experienced with other books. I went into this expecting something extremely dark. Unfortunately for me it just did not live up to the darkness of previous novels I have read. I found myself constantly comparing it to them, and it just fell short. However, just because it wasn’t dark enough for me does not mean it won’t be dark for other people. Please approach this book with caution as there are some possible triggers. Towards the end I found myself feeling confused by the storyline, I’m still not really sure what happened. I do still hope to watch the film, maybe that will shed some light on things for me. That being said, I loved that each chapter was linked to a different tarot card, it was so unique! I also found the short excerpt about the author really interesting. If you’ve been wanting to read this please do not let me put you off, many people seem to love it! I would definitely consider reading it again after I’ve seen the movie.
I would recommend this to anyone who likes dark thriller/crime novels. Please be aware of possible trigger warnings and some of the language of the time may be offensive to some. I want to thank Netgalley and Bloomsbury publishing for allowing me to read this book and give my personal thoughts.
September 25, 2021
You know that old saying “if you can’t say something nice about a person don’t say anything at all” – if William Gresham really believed that he would have written
NIGHTMARE ALLEY
THE END
There’s a lady in the audience tonight, I think her first name begins with a C and her last name with a G, and she’s concerned about someone close to her, who could that be, oh I believe it’s her husband. This lady wishes to know will her husband get better, he’s sick now, he has worries. Yes, I think it’s Clarice is it? Yes there you are… I can tell you you have real good reason to be cheerful, I feel very strongly your husband will soon be feeling so much better, maybe by the end of this month.
So Nightmare Alley begins in the carny and 100% convinces me that William Gresham knew what he was talking about, there’s a lot of great detail in here about the tricks of the trade, especially regarding “mentalists”, folks who do mind-reading acts which are blended with advice to the bewildered.
Of course it’s all done with mirrors – actually, with an assistant the audience can’t see, and a little bit of rough and ready basic psychology and on the spot Sherlock Holmes style deduction. Or with an assistant the audience can see who uses a word code.
What is it with carnivals? I guess it’s where the marks meet the grifters, the palms meet the mittreaders, the straight world meets the freaks, the geeks and the lady who can be electrocuted as 5000 whole entire volts pass right through her body, and everybody gets what they came for, their future told in the Tarot, a goggle at the half-a-man, hilarity in the Hall of Mirrors - always tinged with that note of hysteria (all those mad sequences in movies and tv shows where our hero is drawn into the insanity of the Hall of Mirrors, he he hee, haw haw haw) – and the little kids who always go missing on the carousel, one minute whirling around in joy, next minute gone. Ray Bradbury’s carnival in Something Wicked This Way Comes, Charles Finney’s circus/carny in The Circus of Doctor Lao, Bob Dylan’s carnival on Desolation Row, Stephen King’s version in Joyland, then of course Todd Bowning’s movie Freaks, Rob Zombie’s movie House of 1000 Corpses, round and round and round it goes and where it stops, no one knows.
In this novel we are following Stan Carlisle who starts as a magician then leaves the carny to set up in the spook racket. He’s looking for the One Great Mark, the jackpot, and he thinks he gets one too. But then….
I feel like a churl but I have to say that the denouement, when it finally arrives, has one entirely silly part, which I did not buy, I ain’t that much of a sucker; and such a shame, because I bought the rest, hook, line & sinker. But at this very crucial part of the plot I could see with my very own eyes that there was a small man in a booth at the back who was making these things appear in the middle of the air like that; and the ghostly voices, why, they was just an old record playing in the next room is all.
Aside from that, this novel zings and zangs and drags the reader through all manner of degrading scenes – it has a very low opinion of humanity. Or perhaps that’s just Stan Carlisle. But I got the impression that was William Gresham too.
3.5 stars - so close to a 4th star it can smell the paintwork
NIGHTMARE ALLEY
THE END
There’s a lady in the audience tonight, I think her first name begins with a C and her last name with a G, and she’s concerned about someone close to her, who could that be, oh I believe it’s her husband. This lady wishes to know will her husband get better, he’s sick now, he has worries. Yes, I think it’s Clarice is it? Yes there you are… I can tell you you have real good reason to be cheerful, I feel very strongly your husband will soon be feeling so much better, maybe by the end of this month.
So Nightmare Alley begins in the carny and 100% convinces me that William Gresham knew what he was talking about, there’s a lot of great detail in here about the tricks of the trade, especially regarding “mentalists”, folks who do mind-reading acts which are blended with advice to the bewildered.
Of course it’s all done with mirrors – actually, with an assistant the audience can’t see, and a little bit of rough and ready basic psychology and on the spot Sherlock Holmes style deduction. Or with an assistant the audience can see who uses a word code.
What is it with carnivals? I guess it’s where the marks meet the grifters, the palms meet the mittreaders, the straight world meets the freaks, the geeks and the lady who can be electrocuted as 5000 whole entire volts pass right through her body, and everybody gets what they came for, their future told in the Tarot, a goggle at the half-a-man, hilarity in the Hall of Mirrors - always tinged with that note of hysteria (all those mad sequences in movies and tv shows where our hero is drawn into the insanity of the Hall of Mirrors, he he hee, haw haw haw) – and the little kids who always go missing on the carousel, one minute whirling around in joy, next minute gone. Ray Bradbury’s carnival in Something Wicked This Way Comes, Charles Finney’s circus/carny in The Circus of Doctor Lao, Bob Dylan’s carnival on Desolation Row, Stephen King’s version in Joyland, then of course Todd Bowning’s movie Freaks, Rob Zombie’s movie House of 1000 Corpses, round and round and round it goes and where it stops, no one knows.
In this novel we are following Stan Carlisle who starts as a magician then leaves the carny to set up in the spook racket. He’s looking for the One Great Mark, the jackpot, and he thinks he gets one too. But then….
I feel like a churl but I have to say that the denouement, when it finally arrives, has one entirely silly part, which I did not buy, I ain’t that much of a sucker; and such a shame, because I bought the rest, hook, line & sinker. But at this very crucial part of the plot I could see with my very own eyes that there was a small man in a booth at the back who was making these things appear in the middle of the air like that; and the ghostly voices, why, they was just an old record playing in the next room is all.
Aside from that, this novel zings and zangs and drags the reader through all manner of degrading scenes – it has a very low opinion of humanity. Or perhaps that’s just Stan Carlisle. But I got the impression that was William Gresham too.
3.5 stars - so close to a 4th star it can smell the paintwork
September 29, 2022
Stan Carlisle is a mentalist in a traveling carnival. But the young man has higher aspirations and not many moral qualms. In the carnival he hooks up with Molly, an attractive young woman who becomes his partner in a vaudeville routine. Still aiming higher, Stan buys a mail-order divinity degree and sets himself up as a spiritualist.
Stan is looking for the one big mark that will make his fortune, but his own life is beginning to unravel. Molly possesses the moral compass that Stan lacks, and she is becoming increasingly reluctant to take advantage of impressionable victims who constitute the couple's bread and butter. Additionally, Stan has begun drinking heavily and is haunted by his complicated past.
Finally, Stan joins forces with an unscrupulous psychologist named Lilith Ritter. The beautiful and whip-smart Lilith mesmerizes Stan and steers him toward an industrialist that will be the biggest fish Stan has ever landed and who will set Stan and Lilith on the road to Easy Street. That is, of course, if everything goes according to plan...
This book was originally published in 1946. It's a dark and compelling story of a man who slowly descends into a hell of his own making, and reading the book is like watching a car crash in slow motion. It's horrifying to watch, but you can't turn away.
Stan is looking for the one big mark that will make his fortune, but his own life is beginning to unravel. Molly possesses the moral compass that Stan lacks, and she is becoming increasingly reluctant to take advantage of impressionable victims who constitute the couple's bread and butter. Additionally, Stan has begun drinking heavily and is haunted by his complicated past.
Finally, Stan joins forces with an unscrupulous psychologist named Lilith Ritter. The beautiful and whip-smart Lilith mesmerizes Stan and steers him toward an industrialist that will be the biggest fish Stan has ever landed and who will set Stan and Lilith on the road to Easy Street. That is, of course, if everything goes according to plan...
This book was originally published in 1946. It's a dark and compelling story of a man who slowly descends into a hell of his own making, and reading the book is like watching a car crash in slow motion. It's horrifying to watch, but you can't turn away.
June 24, 2021
What a very miserable American noir this is. There was not even a tiny moment of consolation throughout the story. I thought the novel interesting, but very depressing. Perhaps I’ll think differently about it in a while and will write another review as I cannot deny it is a remarkable story and written in a very interesting voice.
June 16, 2021
I came across this novel browsing my bookshelves looking for a read to "jump out" at me. "Nightmare Alley" was the jumper. Like so many books I own, I could not remember why I had purchased it, or when. Amazon told me it was in 2015, and that was all it told me.
The book is published by New York Review Books, and thus has the imprimatur of a publisher known for rescuing minor classics and a few major ones.
I was a bit surprised, then, when I read the intro by the late Nick Tosches and found that "Nightmare Alley" was a noir novel and was William Lindsay Gresham's only major work. It is a novel about the netherworld of "carnies," the "freaks" who work the carnival circuit and Gresham uses this milieu, which he apparently knew well, as a backdrop for a larger story about one man's ruination owing to cupidity, ill-luck, and an overestimation of his con-artist trickery.
"Nightmare Alley is a very strange book. It was published in 1946 in a toned-down version because it uses some salty language--real life language--to describe certain events and people--language that would be offensive even today, perhaps more so.
Gresham has talent as a writer and writes a compelling story. Since "Nightmare Alley" is a noir novel you already know things will not end well for Stanton "Stan" Carlisle, the protagonist. We meet him working at a carnival as a magician, roaming with the other carnies from town-to-town. Carnival life is aptly portrayed and even in the 1940s carnies would save enough to stake them to spend winters relaxing in Florida. Stan's fellow carnies are the usual motley crew and are loyal and protective to one another, except when they are not.
Stan is a clever character and fast talker and eventually trades in his magic kit for life as a spiritual guide, doing cold readings, holding seances and using his prestidigitation talents to conjure up deceased relatives and bilk "marks" out of lots of money.
But, like many Americans, Stan is seeking his big break. He wants to find some really rich marks and take them for a lot of moolah so he can live the opulent life he feels he deserves. He is never satisfied with just earning a decent living bilking spiritual seekers for low money.
In a plot as convoluted as anything Jim Thompson or Philip K. Dick ever wrote, Stan finally finds a way to fleece a wealthy industrialist and, as anticipated, he has early success until his scheme goes tragically awry and his life begins a downhill slide till he descends to the lowest level of carny status, working as a "geek" biting the heads off chickens and snakes and while a tout ponders to the stunned audience whether he is man or beast.
This is a 3.5 star book and quite well-written. It's main flaw is in its pacing, which moves a bit too fast as the book winds down to its sad denouement. It's definitely not a book for everybody and I'd recommend it to lovers of transgressive fiction or hard-boiled crime fiction. If you are easily offended by political incorrectness, I'd give it a pass.
The book is published by New York Review Books, and thus has the imprimatur of a publisher known for rescuing minor classics and a few major ones.
I was a bit surprised, then, when I read the intro by the late Nick Tosches and found that "Nightmare Alley" was a noir novel and was William Lindsay Gresham's only major work. It is a novel about the netherworld of "carnies," the "freaks" who work the carnival circuit and Gresham uses this milieu, which he apparently knew well, as a backdrop for a larger story about one man's ruination owing to cupidity, ill-luck, and an overestimation of his con-artist trickery.
"Nightmare Alley is a very strange book. It was published in 1946 in a toned-down version because it uses some salty language--real life language--to describe certain events and people--language that would be offensive even today, perhaps more so.
Gresham has talent as a writer and writes a compelling story. Since "Nightmare Alley" is a noir novel you already know things will not end well for Stanton "Stan" Carlisle, the protagonist. We meet him working at a carnival as a magician, roaming with the other carnies from town-to-town. Carnival life is aptly portrayed and even in the 1940s carnies would save enough to stake them to spend winters relaxing in Florida. Stan's fellow carnies are the usual motley crew and are loyal and protective to one another, except when they are not.
Stan is a clever character and fast talker and eventually trades in his magic kit for life as a spiritual guide, doing cold readings, holding seances and using his prestidigitation talents to conjure up deceased relatives and bilk "marks" out of lots of money.
But, like many Americans, Stan is seeking his big break. He wants to find some really rich marks and take them for a lot of moolah so he can live the opulent life he feels he deserves. He is never satisfied with just earning a decent living bilking spiritual seekers for low money.
In a plot as convoluted as anything Jim Thompson or Philip K. Dick ever wrote, Stan finally finds a way to fleece a wealthy industrialist and, as anticipated, he has early success until his scheme goes tragically awry and his life begins a downhill slide till he descends to the lowest level of carny status, working as a "geek" biting the heads off chickens and snakes and while a tout ponders to the stunned audience whether he is man or beast.
This is a 3.5 star book and quite well-written. It's main flaw is in its pacing, which moves a bit too fast as the book winds down to its sad denouement. It's definitely not a book for everybody and I'd recommend it to lovers of transgressive fiction or hard-boiled crime fiction. If you are easily offended by political incorrectness, I'd give it a pass.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
December 1, 2021
And a film version in December 2021, just in time for the holidays, aw.
A pretty miserable noir classic that out-Calvins Calvinism in its view of total depravity, at the site of a forties American carnival, published in 1946, one year after the war ended. The carnival is a by now familiar site for American misery, recalling oh so many tales of darkness and horror, situated in a fall from innocence, from “ooh! A carnival! So much fun!” to “ugh! Don’t go near those men, honey,” creepy, leering carnies in poverty and desperation and drunken despair. A kind of American allegory, usually also about the hard-scrabble need to survive, about poverty, but more broadly about some combination of the Deadly Sins, such as Lust and Greed.
“Oh, Christ, why do you have to grow up into a life like this one? Why do you ever have to want women, want power, make money, make love, keep up a front, sell the act, suck around some booking agent, get gypped on the check—?”
Think of Ray Bradbury’s carnival in Something Wicked This Way Comes; or an American working-class noir version of Celine’s Death on the Installment Plan; Tod Browning's movie Freaks with a dollop of deeper, more cynical realism. With a dash of Nelson Algren’s Never Comes Morning, and a pinch of Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. Gutter lyricism.
“What sort of God would put us here in this goddamned, stinking slaughterhouse of a world?”
What a week for me to also be listening to Death in Yellowstone, which features every possible kind of grisly, macabre death that can happen in nature’s wonderland, and happening to people who are just the kind of gullible rubes featured in Nightmare Alley.
Yeah, it's a grifter story, too, about folks scrambling to survive, hoping to thrive, to make the one big score. The anti-hero of the story is Stan Carlisle, a carnie magician who at the opening watches with us in horror and fascination the Carnival Freak Show (and yeah, I am old enough to have seen one of these, I regret to say), featuring:
“Now this creature--There he is, THE GEEK! He has puzzled the foremost scientists of Europe and America. Is he the missing link? Is he man or beast? Some have pronounced him man. But beneath that shaggy mane of hair lies the brain of a beast.”
Think ahead to Geek Love by Katherine Dunn, where the geeks, within this world, are the truly valued. To be "normal" is to be cast off, of no use to the carnival life.
Carlisle doesn’t want to end up like the geek. He needs moolah, so studies to become a mentalist (fake mind reader) and on up and up to become Rev. Carlisle, the spiritualist, The American Con Man’s Dream, bilking every dope along the way, looking for the Big Mark that will make him rich and get him outta this mess:
“Nothing matters in this goddamned lunatic asylum of a world but dough.”
Here’s the Great Stanton with a little more of that lyricism I told you was in here, but with no more optimism about The Human Spirit:
“In a patch of silver the Rev. Carlisle stopped and raised his face to the full moon, where it hung desolately, agonizingly bright - a dead thing, watching the dying earth.”
Think Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis, too; the itinerant traveling preacher, passing the collection plate to all the yokels.
As I said, this came out in 1946, and though Hitler was defeated this was also the time of reflecting on the horrors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, which may be partly the case here, but trust me, William Gresham was already a miserable sonofagun. You may recall that his wife, the poet Joy Davidson, left him and married C.S. Lewis, a somewhat more hopeful kinda guy than Gresham (okay, by far). Samuel Beckett produced Waiting for Godot in 1948, and that seems in comparison light-hearted (though there are a few laughs in Nightmare Alley, too). Gresham finally committed suicide in 1962.
Another lost-cause character here that I like and feel sorry for is a young girl named Molly, who began her carny life working as a "show girl," and who was lucky enough to land the role of “electric girl,” who got to sit in the facsimile of an Electric Chair and (supposedly) sustain any voltage run through her. Who does she end up with? Stan the Man, of course, so yeah, we feel sorry for her. From the frying pan to the fire.
So it sounds like I might hate the book but I like noir, and I like being dragged through all that moral malaise. I like Jim Thompson and Celine and Cormac McCarthy, those guys that (yes, I'll say) beautifully capture the lowest of the low currents in human life. Because they exist. Gresham isn’t for me quite as good as those other guys, but for noir, this earns the title classic.
A pretty miserable noir classic that out-Calvins Calvinism in its view of total depravity, at the site of a forties American carnival, published in 1946, one year after the war ended. The carnival is a by now familiar site for American misery, recalling oh so many tales of darkness and horror, situated in a fall from innocence, from “ooh! A carnival! So much fun!” to “ugh! Don’t go near those men, honey,” creepy, leering carnies in poverty and desperation and drunken despair. A kind of American allegory, usually also about the hard-scrabble need to survive, about poverty, but more broadly about some combination of the Deadly Sins, such as Lust and Greed.
“Oh, Christ, why do you have to grow up into a life like this one? Why do you ever have to want women, want power, make money, make love, keep up a front, sell the act, suck around some booking agent, get gypped on the check—?”
Think of Ray Bradbury’s carnival in Something Wicked This Way Comes; or an American working-class noir version of Celine’s Death on the Installment Plan; Tod Browning's movie Freaks with a dollop of deeper, more cynical realism. With a dash of Nelson Algren’s Never Comes Morning, and a pinch of Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. Gutter lyricism.
“What sort of God would put us here in this goddamned, stinking slaughterhouse of a world?”
What a week for me to also be listening to Death in Yellowstone, which features every possible kind of grisly, macabre death that can happen in nature’s wonderland, and happening to people who are just the kind of gullible rubes featured in Nightmare Alley.
Yeah, it's a grifter story, too, about folks scrambling to survive, hoping to thrive, to make the one big score. The anti-hero of the story is Stan Carlisle, a carnie magician who at the opening watches with us in horror and fascination the Carnival Freak Show (and yeah, I am old enough to have seen one of these, I regret to say), featuring:
“Now this creature--There he is, THE GEEK! He has puzzled the foremost scientists of Europe and America. Is he the missing link? Is he man or beast? Some have pronounced him man. But beneath that shaggy mane of hair lies the brain of a beast.”
Think ahead to Geek Love by Katherine Dunn, where the geeks, within this world, are the truly valued. To be "normal" is to be cast off, of no use to the carnival life.
Carlisle doesn’t want to end up like the geek. He needs moolah, so studies to become a mentalist (fake mind reader) and on up and up to become Rev. Carlisle, the spiritualist, The American Con Man’s Dream, bilking every dope along the way, looking for the Big Mark that will make him rich and get him outta this mess:
“Nothing matters in this goddamned lunatic asylum of a world but dough.”
Here’s the Great Stanton with a little more of that lyricism I told you was in here, but with no more optimism about The Human Spirit:
“In a patch of silver the Rev. Carlisle stopped and raised his face to the full moon, where it hung desolately, agonizingly bright - a dead thing, watching the dying earth.”
Think Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis, too; the itinerant traveling preacher, passing the collection plate to all the yokels.
As I said, this came out in 1946, and though Hitler was defeated this was also the time of reflecting on the horrors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, which may be partly the case here, but trust me, William Gresham was already a miserable sonofagun. You may recall that his wife, the poet Joy Davidson, left him and married C.S. Lewis, a somewhat more hopeful kinda guy than Gresham (okay, by far). Samuel Beckett produced Waiting for Godot in 1948, and that seems in comparison light-hearted (though there are a few laughs in Nightmare Alley, too). Gresham finally committed suicide in 1962.
Another lost-cause character here that I like and feel sorry for is a young girl named Molly, who began her carny life working as a "show girl," and who was lucky enough to land the role of “electric girl,” who got to sit in the facsimile of an Electric Chair and (supposedly) sustain any voltage run through her. Who does she end up with? Stan the Man, of course, so yeah, we feel sorry for her. From the frying pan to the fire.
So it sounds like I might hate the book but I like noir, and I like being dragged through all that moral malaise. I like Jim Thompson and Celine and Cormac McCarthy, those guys that (yes, I'll say) beautifully capture the lowest of the low currents in human life. Because they exist. Gresham isn’t for me quite as good as those other guys, but for noir, this earns the title classic.
September 29, 2014
Early reports from friends suggested that this was a lurid melodrama set in a carnival; a warped carnie fantasia with freaks foregrounded. While the first few chapters fit this description fairly well - with a somewhat fragmented narrative accentuating the fun-house mirror effect (which by the way has an ill-fit with the remainder of the book), and the melodrama thick and lurid until the end - what I ultimately found more interesting were the occult themes running throughout, as related by an author obviously versed in their real-life twisted intricacies, where elusive uncanny fact flip-flops with outright scam, where sincere spiritual longing confronts capitalistic snake oil salesmen.
Though Gresham presents these occult themes as a vehicle for the main character’s unscrupulous despicableness, as he uses every trick in the spiritual huckster’s book to extort money from needy souls, a brief reading of his life will tell you that he was tormented by an attraction/repulsion to the world of the occult. He was married to a woman who fell under the spell of C. S. Lewis’ version of Christianity, eventually leaving Gresham and moving to England to marry Lewis (see the movie Shadowlands); and with his next wife he became deeply interested in spiritualism upon entering AA. His was a tortured life; a life of alcoholism and spousal abuse, of aggressive skepticism regarding the spiritual and a need to believe in “something else”. And it appears he never found a reconciling higher ground where his split nature could unify – he died of cancer in apparent deep dark soul misery.
But of course all this inner turmoil and torment only serves to make his book better! (Readers as vultures, mouths watering...) It adds a tactile authenticity to his accounts of the spiritualist displays, which in other hands could’ve been mere reportage, or have been delivered with a smug detachment of sneering snickers. Gresham himself presents it with a sneer, but it is made delectable by an inner torment that remains tacit, creating a palpable atmosphere of needy dread. His main character is lost and doomed; lost and doomed in a world where possible solutions are everywhere at hand, yet ever out of ultimate reach; the most notable of which is simple love and community, a faith without metaphysics or table-tapping.
But no noir's complete without its share of sick eroticism. The erotic themes here are as palpable, and as twisted, as the spiritualist themes. Spiritual manipulation goes hand in hand with erotic manipulation; the erotic and spiritual impulses often so intertwined as to be indistinguishable (as many a saint could tell you). One character, who ends up used and abused by the main character, is a hoochie woman in the carnival, but is otherwise virginal, though her childhood is revealed as poisoned with paternal incest. In one of my favorite scenes a man gropes insanely at what he thinks is a physical manifestation of a departed loved one, but which is actually this poor woman roped into the huckster's scams by erotic tyranny. Purity and spoilage are never far apart in this rickety midnight roller coaster of a book.
* * * *
After reading the book I saw the movie and was disappointed. While it's a very good and effective noir, the spiritualist themes are given short shrift, and next to the book is a rough truncation.
Though Gresham presents these occult themes as a vehicle for the main character’s unscrupulous despicableness, as he uses every trick in the spiritual huckster’s book to extort money from needy souls, a brief reading of his life will tell you that he was tormented by an attraction/repulsion to the world of the occult. He was married to a woman who fell under the spell of C. S. Lewis’ version of Christianity, eventually leaving Gresham and moving to England to marry Lewis (see the movie Shadowlands); and with his next wife he became deeply interested in spiritualism upon entering AA. His was a tortured life; a life of alcoholism and spousal abuse, of aggressive skepticism regarding the spiritual and a need to believe in “something else”. And it appears he never found a reconciling higher ground where his split nature could unify – he died of cancer in apparent deep dark soul misery.
But of course all this inner turmoil and torment only serves to make his book better! (Readers as vultures, mouths watering...) It adds a tactile authenticity to his accounts of the spiritualist displays, which in other hands could’ve been mere reportage, or have been delivered with a smug detachment of sneering snickers. Gresham himself presents it with a sneer, but it is made delectable by an inner torment that remains tacit, creating a palpable atmosphere of needy dread. His main character is lost and doomed; lost and doomed in a world where possible solutions are everywhere at hand, yet ever out of ultimate reach; the most notable of which is simple love and community, a faith without metaphysics or table-tapping.
But no noir's complete without its share of sick eroticism. The erotic themes here are as palpable, and as twisted, as the spiritualist themes. Spiritual manipulation goes hand in hand with erotic manipulation; the erotic and spiritual impulses often so intertwined as to be indistinguishable (as many a saint could tell you). One character, who ends up used and abused by the main character, is a hoochie woman in the carnival, but is otherwise virginal, though her childhood is revealed as poisoned with paternal incest. In one of my favorite scenes a man gropes insanely at what he thinks is a physical manifestation of a departed loved one, but which is actually this poor woman roped into the huckster's scams by erotic tyranny. Purity and spoilage are never far apart in this rickety midnight roller coaster of a book.
* * * *
After reading the book I saw the movie and was disappointed. While it's a very good and effective noir, the spiritualist themes are given short shrift, and next to the book is a rough truncation.
March 9, 2014
Anyone intending to read this novel needs to own the edition pictured in this review and published in 2010 by New York Review Books Classics.
It has an introduction by Nick Tosches (which should not be read until after finishing the novel) that along with biographical information on William Lindsay Gresham reveals that this edition is the first complete and uncensored version of NIGHTMARE ALLEY to have been published since the first edition back in 1946.
One other thing: while the film version of this novel remains one of the greatest noirs ever made, it doesn't begin to approach the darkness or the sliminess found in these pages.
Fun stuff.
Enjoy!
February 16, 2022
Fans of illusion and noir, rejoice! I see this 1940s pulp novel in your future..
Back in the day when hobos jumped freight trains and alkies slugged Sterno, traveling carnivals offered small-town delight and a sideshow of unhappiness to middle America.
Stan Carlisle, the young and ambitious carnie is blonde and handsome, full of charm, and easy with memorized Bible verses. He sees a way to climb beyond the footlights and into success by moving from swiped tarot acts and horoscopes-for-a-dime to mind reading. If you've seen the recent movie (abd sequel) Now You See Me, then envision the blonde, good looking mentalist played by Woody Harrelson - and BAM. Just like that, you've got Stan Carlisle as he ages over a couple of decades.
From side show performers all the way to seances held for the rich and famous, Stan's affluence grows. But as his path seems easier, he never quite gets away from his childhood and the alley way of bad dreams.
I absolutely loved that this book is broken into chapters that are titled by the Tarot cards in a deck. There is also some human psychology involved in the story which is something I would not have expected from a book written in the 1940s. Some of that pop psychology was a little bit clunky for today's day and age, but it was not a big distraction.
Whether you see Stan's fortune in the Tarot's magician card, the hanged man, or the fool, this dark story is as tricky as the palm reader sneaking peeks into your pocketbook for photos and ticket stubs. A fun, dark ride!
Back in the day when hobos jumped freight trains and alkies slugged Sterno, traveling carnivals offered small-town delight and a sideshow of unhappiness to middle America.
Stan Carlisle, the young and ambitious carnie is blonde and handsome, full of charm, and easy with memorized Bible verses. He sees a way to climb beyond the footlights and into success by moving from swiped tarot acts and horoscopes-for-a-dime to mind reading. If you've seen the recent movie (abd sequel) Now You See Me, then envision the blonde, good looking mentalist played by Woody Harrelson - and BAM. Just like that, you've got Stan Carlisle as he ages over a couple of decades.
From side show performers all the way to seances held for the rich and famous, Stan's affluence grows. But as his path seems easier, he never quite gets away from his childhood and the alley way of bad dreams.
I absolutely loved that this book is broken into chapters that are titled by the Tarot cards in a deck. There is also some human psychology involved in the story which is something I would not have expected from a book written in the 1940s. Some of that pop psychology was a little bit clunky for today's day and age, but it was not a big distraction.
Whether you see Stan's fortune in the Tarot's magician card, the hanged man, or the fool, this dark story is as tricky as the palm reader sneaking peeks into your pocketbook for photos and ticket stubs. A fun, dark ride!
December 1, 2021
4-5 stars.
This is the story of the rise and fall of Stanton Carlisle whose life goes almost full circle. His tale starts as a geek in a carny (carnival) freak show to becoming a mentalist at the same fairground and then on to his rise as a spiritualist Reverend and some ‘great’ cons. His fall from grace is certainly dramatic and takes him back to his humble beginnings. His story is further highlighted by the interspersing of Romany tarot cards and takes us from card one The Fool right through to 22 The Hangman and I love the inclusion of those as they are so apt and pertinent.
I didn’t expect to love this book as much as I do but before you know it you find yourself as an incredulous observer of Stan and the other great characters. I love the depiction of the colourful carnival acts, the writing is so vivid and engaging it’s as if you are present at the shows. There’s everything on display here with all its trickery, fakery, the cons, the misdirections with the wool pulling and convincing via unseen codes and signals. The characterisation is fantastic, Stan starts as an enigma but we see his steel, intelligence and manipulative tendencies and as time marches on we understand his background and heavy baggage. Although this is a dark tale there is so much humour present especially in the dialogue and what we end up with it’s a great blend of fear, intrigue, betrayal, danger, violence and fun albeit often dry or jet black. I marvel at the long cons and smile wryly at the con to outsmart the master con artist. It’s very of its time in the representation of society, people in their place and the divisions of segregation, it’s also present in some dialogue which may seem cheesy to us today but it’s certainly typical of the era.
Overall, yes this is certainly “The Dark Alley’ which is seen in the shades of light and the bleakness of dark fear but I find this a fascinating and intense clever mixture. I can’t wait to see the soon to be released movie version directed by Guillermo del Toro as it reads like a movie and thus is tailor-made!
With thanks to NetGalley and especially to Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, Raven for the much appreciated arc in return for an honest review.
This is the story of the rise and fall of Stanton Carlisle whose life goes almost full circle. His tale starts as a geek in a carny (carnival) freak show to becoming a mentalist at the same fairground and then on to his rise as a spiritualist Reverend and some ‘great’ cons. His fall from grace is certainly dramatic and takes him back to his humble beginnings. His story is further highlighted by the interspersing of Romany tarot cards and takes us from card one The Fool right through to 22 The Hangman and I love the inclusion of those as they are so apt and pertinent.
I didn’t expect to love this book as much as I do but before you know it you find yourself as an incredulous observer of Stan and the other great characters. I love the depiction of the colourful carnival acts, the writing is so vivid and engaging it’s as if you are present at the shows. There’s everything on display here with all its trickery, fakery, the cons, the misdirections with the wool pulling and convincing via unseen codes and signals. The characterisation is fantastic, Stan starts as an enigma but we see his steel, intelligence and manipulative tendencies and as time marches on we understand his background and heavy baggage. Although this is a dark tale there is so much humour present especially in the dialogue and what we end up with it’s a great blend of fear, intrigue, betrayal, danger, violence and fun albeit often dry or jet black. I marvel at the long cons and smile wryly at the con to outsmart the master con artist. It’s very of its time in the representation of society, people in their place and the divisions of segregation, it’s also present in some dialogue which may seem cheesy to us today but it’s certainly typical of the era.
Overall, yes this is certainly “The Dark Alley’ which is seen in the shades of light and the bleakness of dark fear but I find this a fascinating and intense clever mixture. I can’t wait to see the soon to be released movie version directed by Guillermo del Toro as it reads like a movie and thus is tailor-made!
With thanks to NetGalley and especially to Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, Raven for the much appreciated arc in return for an honest review.
September 13, 2021
Nightmare Alley is about the rise and fall of conman Stanton Carlisle, beginning in his early carny days performing sleight of hand card tricks, to becoming a mentalist (“psychic”), to moving into spiritualism and claiming to speak to the dead - of the wealthy, of course - until he eventually bites off more than he can chew.
It’s a 1940s noir novel but I wouldn’t say it was a “classic” or even remotely good. William Lindsay Gresham’s pseudo-morality tale is obvious throughout with an uninteresting message (being dishonest is baaaad) and one hammy scene after another.
It’s not exciting in the least to watch Stan get more proficient at conning crowds - why would it be? It would’ve been better if Gresham spared us the plodding rise and just showed us him at his peak so he could tell the story of his downfall, given that’s what the book’s really about. He’s also an obnoxious character, driven by greed and ego, humoured by his dull wife Molly, whom he’s horrible to (Gresham himself was a wife beater and drunk, like Stan - Gresham’s first wife eventually divorced him, moved to England with their two children and married CS Lewis).
Each chapter has something loosely to do with a Tarot card (a reference to Stan’s profession), which turns out to be contrived as some of the chapters, particularly the short latter ones, have little to do with the larger story and seem to just be about the card.
The title itself seems to reference the tunnel, aka “the light at the end of the tunnel” that people claim to see when near death, which I guess ties into the spiritualism aspect, and might be a metaphor for Stan’s torrid life - or not, as I may be completely off on that interpretation. It’s likely as superficial as the Tarot cards gimmick.
There’s also an attempt at a twist ending in the final act that’s very poorly handled because Gresham wasn’t much of a writer. The effect is just confusing and pointless, given what happens after (ie. not much).
Boring and underwhelming story, unmemorable and tedious characters, and a whole lotta nothin’ - Nightmare Alley is the literary equivalent of a third-rate carnival act.
It’s a 1940s noir novel but I wouldn’t say it was a “classic” or even remotely good. William Lindsay Gresham’s pseudo-morality tale is obvious throughout with an uninteresting message (being dishonest is baaaad) and one hammy scene after another.
It’s not exciting in the least to watch Stan get more proficient at conning crowds - why would it be? It would’ve been better if Gresham spared us the plodding rise and just showed us him at his peak so he could tell the story of his downfall, given that’s what the book’s really about. He’s also an obnoxious character, driven by greed and ego, humoured by his dull wife Molly, whom he’s horrible to (Gresham himself was a wife beater and drunk, like Stan - Gresham’s first wife eventually divorced him, moved to England with their two children and married CS Lewis).
Each chapter has something loosely to do with a Tarot card (a reference to Stan’s profession), which turns out to be contrived as some of the chapters, particularly the short latter ones, have little to do with the larger story and seem to just be about the card.
The title itself seems to reference the tunnel, aka “the light at the end of the tunnel” that people claim to see when near death, which I guess ties into the spiritualism aspect, and might be a metaphor for Stan’s torrid life - or not, as I may be completely off on that interpretation. It’s likely as superficial as the Tarot cards gimmick.
There’s also an attempt at a twist ending in the final act that’s very poorly handled because Gresham wasn’t much of a writer. The effect is just confusing and pointless, given what happens after (ie. not much).
Boring and underwhelming story, unmemorable and tedious characters, and a whole lotta nothin’ - Nightmare Alley is the literary equivalent of a third-rate carnival act.
April 8, 2021
Dust when it was dry. Mud when it was rainy. Swearing, steaming, sweating, scheming, bribing, bellowing, cheating, the carny went its way. It came like a pillar of fire by night, bringing excitement and new things into the drowsy towns --- lights and noise and the chance to win an Indian blanket, to ride on the ferris wheel, to see the wild man who fondles those rep-tiles as a mother would fondle her babes. Then it vanished in the night, leaving the trodden grass of the field and the debris of popcorn boxes and rusting tin ice-cream spoons to show where it had been.
The beginning of this book oozes with a spooooky carnival vibe. There are unsavory characters performing unsanitary deeds. You get the feeling there may even be a carousel that can make you young again right around the corner. BUT . . . for some reason, the author decided to leave all that behind and have his plain-vanilla male lead leave the show, taking the less interesting of the two female characters with him, to start his own con of bilking rich folk with fake seances.
"They're all afraid of ill health, of poverty, of boredom, of failure. Fear is the key to human nature. They're afraid . . . "
Here's where the book lost its creepy charm for me, though I see plenty of others LOVED the tale. The writing and dialog are both quite good - but I sure missed that carnival atmosphere. The ending also features some , though I saw it coming a mile away.
"I'm a hustler, God damn it. Do you understand that, you frozen-faced bitch? I'm on the make. Nothing matters in this goddamned lunatic asylum of a world but dough. When you get that you're the boss. If you don't have it you're the end man on the daisy chain. I'm going to get it if I have to bust every bone in my head doing it. I'm going to milk it out of these chumps and take them for the gold in their teeth before I'm through."
If you're interested in delving deeply into one scumbag's psyche, you'll probably enjoy this one far more than I did. But to leave a cast full of fascinating carny characters to devote the rest of the pages to this chump? I'll never understand it.
The beginning of this book oozes with a spooooky carnival vibe. There are unsavory characters performing unsanitary deeds. You get the feeling there may even be a carousel that can make you young again right around the corner. BUT . . . for some reason, the author decided to leave all that behind and have his plain-vanilla male lead leave the show, taking the less interesting of the two female characters with him, to start his own con of bilking rich folk with fake seances.
"They're all afraid of ill health, of poverty, of boredom, of failure. Fear is the key to human nature. They're afraid . . . "
Here's where the book lost its creepy charm for me, though I see plenty of others LOVED the tale. The writing and dialog are both quite good - but I sure missed that carnival atmosphere. The ending also features some , though I saw it coming a mile away.
"I'm a hustler, God damn it. Do you understand that, you frozen-faced bitch? I'm on the make. Nothing matters in this goddamned lunatic asylum of a world but dough. When you get that you're the boss. If you don't have it you're the end man on the daisy chain. I'm going to get it if I have to bust every bone in my head doing it. I'm going to milk it out of these chumps and take them for the gold in their teeth before I'm through."
If you're interested in delving deeply into one scumbag's psyche, you'll probably enjoy this one far more than I did. But to leave a cast full of fascinating carny characters to devote the rest of the pages to this chump? I'll never understand it.
March 14, 2022
I'd seen the original 1947 adaptation about twenty years ago, and the memories of it now are pretty faded, so the plot and its characters in Gresham's novel felt for the most part new to me. Its just a coincidence I happen to have read this now after the recent remake was released in the UK at the back end of January. I've no plans to see it any time soon, as I much prefer classic b&w noirs to 21st century remakes, so I'll likely watch the original again first. Did we even need a remake? I suppose, if it gets more people reading Gresham's novel on the back of watching del Toro's film then it was worth it, because the novel does deserve a new generation of readers. It's really good. For a start, I loved the way the chapters were presented as both a symbol and a metaphor when it came to the usage of tarot cards in each chapter's title, and the sharp lyrical prose, which truly captured this depression-era world of sideshows and freaks; of the cunning and of the alcoholism, was also impressive: the vernacular language in parts did take some getting used to though. Gresham's characters, including the carnival hustler turned religious charlatan Stan, and the icy and mischievous psychiatrist Lilith Ritter, were richly drawn and really got under my skin. No doubt Molly Cahill, the quiet but clever young dame who Stan is drawn to was the most likeable. When it came to the psychological exposure of the characters, and Gresham probing the dark corners of the mind, and also for the overall tone, which was bleak and sinister, the novel I was reminded of the most was Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust. That for me was a masterpiece. Nightmare Alley, despite a rigorously gripping and intricate story, not quite.
December 2, 2025
The Great Stanton
Set in the sleazy low-life world of travelling carnivals in the 1920's -- 1930's, William Lindsay Gresham's 1946 novel, "Nightmare Alley" tells the story of Stan Carlisle from his days as a carnival sleight-of-hand magician, to his rise as a mentalist and spiritualist, to his abject degradation. The book became a 1947 movie starring Tyronne Power. I was drawn to the book because I have been reading American noir and have a fascination with the novel's gritty carnival theme.
The book is replete with opacity and hokum. Each chapter begins with a Tarot Card, as befitting its theme, which is tied in with the development of the story. A popular, best-selling novel in its day, "Nightmare Alley" requires attention to read. The story develops slowly, carefully, and obscurely with substantial foreshadowing. The book becomes clearer by returning to the beginning after an initial reading.
The word "geek" has acquired a contemporary meaning, but in Gresham's novel the word denotes the lowest, most vulgar act in a carnival sideshow. As the book opens, Gresham portrays a "geek", "half man, half animal" as he crawls about on all fours in a dirty pen fondling snakes and killing and eating raw chickens. The most fascinating portions of the book are its portrayals of carnival life, with its "kooch shows", electric girls, tattooed sailors, magicians, midgets, and mind readers. The book's focus is on the "ten in one" show which offered a collage of frauds and freaks for a single price.
Stan Carlisle, the "Great Stanton" is the central character in the book. As it begins, Stan is an ambitious, unprincipled young magician rising in the carny world. The story is told by "misdirection", the heart of the sleight-of-hand worker, as Stan's early life unfolds only gradually and by hints. Stan romances an older carny woman, Zeena, who works as a mentalist answering questions from the audience or "marks" based on a complicated system of cues. An ambitious young man, Stan wants to learn the tricks, which he does in part by knocking off Zeena's alcoholic husband. Stan then teams up with a young girl named Molly, who began her carny life working in a girl show and who has moved up to the role of electric girl. She ostensibly is able to take electricity passed through her body in a replica of the Sing-Sing electric chair. Stan and Molly leave the carnival for bigger and better things and richer marks. For several years, the couple do their mentalism routine in vaudeville shows. They gradually move up to work in the realm of spiritualism, seances, and raising "spooks" which Gresham parodies mercilessly. The Great Stanton finds what proves to be the ultimate vicious femme fatale, a psychiatrist named Lillith Ritter who is more unscrupulous and intelligent than her mark, Stan. Together, they plot to deceive a wealthy manufacturer, Ezra Grindle, who has carried a lifelong guilt when his college sweetheart died from an abortion. Following a long climactic scene, the novels winds inexorably through the world of crime, killing, alcohol, hoboing to eventual geekdom.
Many shocking scenes in the novel take place in alleys, as befitting its title. In one scene, Stan runs through an alley following an encounter with a prostitute en route to a meeting with the psychiatrist, Lillith. The desperate, claustrophobic scene is emblematic of the book. Gresham writes:
"Stan felt the prickle crawl up over his scalp again. The old house was waiting for him and the fat ones with pince-nez and false teeth; this woman doc probably was one of them, for all the music of voice an cool, slow speech. What could she do for him? What could anybody do for him? For anybody? They were all trapped, all running down the alley toward the light."
"Nightmare Alley" is a raw, sordid, powerful book. It is full of details and people which enhance the seamy character of the tale. The primary characters, Stan and Molly, are well and cunningly developed and contrasted. For readers fascinated with such matters and willing to explore noir literature now somewhat off the beaten path, the book offers a sharp portrayal of the underside of American life. The book is available in the single volume I am reviewing here or in a Library of America volume of Crime Novels of American Noir from the 1930s and 40s, "American Noir: 11 Classic Crime Novels of the 1930s, 40s, & 50s (Library of America)". The book also reminded me of a photographic history of Carnival girlie shows by the renowned photographer Susan Meiselas, "Carnival Strippers". Readers interested in the world of the carny will love Gresham's book.
Robin Friedman
Set in the sleazy low-life world of travelling carnivals in the 1920's -- 1930's, William Lindsay Gresham's 1946 novel, "Nightmare Alley" tells the story of Stan Carlisle from his days as a carnival sleight-of-hand magician, to his rise as a mentalist and spiritualist, to his abject degradation. The book became a 1947 movie starring Tyronne Power. I was drawn to the book because I have been reading American noir and have a fascination with the novel's gritty carnival theme.
The book is replete with opacity and hokum. Each chapter begins with a Tarot Card, as befitting its theme, which is tied in with the development of the story. A popular, best-selling novel in its day, "Nightmare Alley" requires attention to read. The story develops slowly, carefully, and obscurely with substantial foreshadowing. The book becomes clearer by returning to the beginning after an initial reading.
The word "geek" has acquired a contemporary meaning, but in Gresham's novel the word denotes the lowest, most vulgar act in a carnival sideshow. As the book opens, Gresham portrays a "geek", "half man, half animal" as he crawls about on all fours in a dirty pen fondling snakes and killing and eating raw chickens. The most fascinating portions of the book are its portrayals of carnival life, with its "kooch shows", electric girls, tattooed sailors, magicians, midgets, and mind readers. The book's focus is on the "ten in one" show which offered a collage of frauds and freaks for a single price.
Stan Carlisle, the "Great Stanton" is the central character in the book. As it begins, Stan is an ambitious, unprincipled young magician rising in the carny world. The story is told by "misdirection", the heart of the sleight-of-hand worker, as Stan's early life unfolds only gradually and by hints. Stan romances an older carny woman, Zeena, who works as a mentalist answering questions from the audience or "marks" based on a complicated system of cues. An ambitious young man, Stan wants to learn the tricks, which he does in part by knocking off Zeena's alcoholic husband. Stan then teams up with a young girl named Molly, who began her carny life working in a girl show and who has moved up to the role of electric girl. She ostensibly is able to take electricity passed through her body in a replica of the Sing-Sing electric chair. Stan and Molly leave the carnival for bigger and better things and richer marks. For several years, the couple do their mentalism routine in vaudeville shows. They gradually move up to work in the realm of spiritualism, seances, and raising "spooks" which Gresham parodies mercilessly. The Great Stanton finds what proves to be the ultimate vicious femme fatale, a psychiatrist named Lillith Ritter who is more unscrupulous and intelligent than her mark, Stan. Together, they plot to deceive a wealthy manufacturer, Ezra Grindle, who has carried a lifelong guilt when his college sweetheart died from an abortion. Following a long climactic scene, the novels winds inexorably through the world of crime, killing, alcohol, hoboing to eventual geekdom.
Many shocking scenes in the novel take place in alleys, as befitting its title. In one scene, Stan runs through an alley following an encounter with a prostitute en route to a meeting with the psychiatrist, Lillith. The desperate, claustrophobic scene is emblematic of the book. Gresham writes:
"Stan felt the prickle crawl up over his scalp again. The old house was waiting for him and the fat ones with pince-nez and false teeth; this woman doc probably was one of them, for all the music of voice an cool, slow speech. What could she do for him? What could anybody do for him? For anybody? They were all trapped, all running down the alley toward the light."
"Nightmare Alley" is a raw, sordid, powerful book. It is full of details and people which enhance the seamy character of the tale. The primary characters, Stan and Molly, are well and cunningly developed and contrasted. For readers fascinated with such matters and willing to explore noir literature now somewhat off the beaten path, the book offers a sharp portrayal of the underside of American life. The book is available in the single volume I am reviewing here or in a Library of America volume of Crime Novels of American Noir from the 1930s and 40s, "American Noir: 11 Classic Crime Novels of the 1930s, 40s, & 50s (Library of America)". The book also reminded me of a photographic history of Carnival girlie shows by the renowned photographer Susan Meiselas, "Carnival Strippers". Readers interested in the world of the carny will love Gresham's book.
Robin Friedman
June 25, 2013
If you've read Chandler, and you've read Hammett ... If you prefer a cigarette to a dame, and a rotgut rye whiskey to both, you'll love this. If you like a little Cain, some Goodis or Willeford, even a little raunchy Simenon when he's feeling unreconstructed-- this one is for you.
This is American Gothic, a noir madhouse on wheels. The major opus of cult writer William Lindsay Gresham, this is a fullscale assault on everything legit, anything on the up and up; Nightmare Alley has exactly no characters that have an observable moral compass, nobody who gives a damn. It doesn't succumb to the cliché or conventions of the genre-- it lives for them.
So while the novel has the traditional noir concern for Redemption, (in both popular flavors, Fleeting and Lost)-- there will be no second chances or consolation prizes. Your choice in leading lady, let's see, here we are: either the alluring 'dumb little tomato', or the sympathetic 'double-crossing bitch'. We'll be involved with carny rats, freaks, confidence men, race, sex, dreams, séances, Freud and the Tarot before we're through. The woods are thick, and they're on fire. Keep a move on, pal.
I found it interesting that this is fairly long and rather involved as compared to the typical genre outing, and yet there's not a word wasted, everything counts, nothing is frivolous. This is a one-way ticket to the deadest of dead ends, and there is something transcendental, minimal, about the prose :
The morgue office of Morningside Hospital was a room in the basement inhabited by Jerry, the night attendant, a shelf of ancient ledgers, and a scarred wreck of a desk. There were two kitchen chairs for visitors, a radio, an electric fan for hot nights and an electric heater for cold ones. The fan was going now.
There are a lot of ways to put you in the picture, but generally Gresham just nails it to the floor with the least possible song and dance. Even the matters of existential conflict (and here he prefigures Hjortsberg's Falling Angel, shading the character's every move and introspection with palpable psychic jeopardy, soul-killing hazard), the author moves the narrative along rather than spinning out the melodrama.
If you have the least affection for the categories of pulp, noir, hard-boiled crime or their fellow travelers, I recommend this heartily, as one of the pillars of the genre.
This is American Gothic, a noir madhouse on wheels. The major opus of cult writer William Lindsay Gresham, this is a fullscale assault on everything legit, anything on the up and up; Nightmare Alley has exactly no characters that have an observable moral compass, nobody who gives a damn. It doesn't succumb to the cliché or conventions of the genre-- it lives for them.
So while the novel has the traditional noir concern for Redemption, (in both popular flavors, Fleeting and Lost)-- there will be no second chances or consolation prizes. Your choice in leading lady, let's see, here we are: either the alluring 'dumb little tomato', or the sympathetic 'double-crossing bitch'. We'll be involved with carny rats, freaks, confidence men, race, sex, dreams, séances, Freud and the Tarot before we're through. The woods are thick, and they're on fire. Keep a move on, pal.
I found it interesting that this is fairly long and rather involved as compared to the typical genre outing, and yet there's not a word wasted, everything counts, nothing is frivolous. This is a one-way ticket to the deadest of dead ends, and there is something transcendental, minimal, about the prose :
The morgue office of Morningside Hospital was a room in the basement inhabited by Jerry, the night attendant, a shelf of ancient ledgers, and a scarred wreck of a desk. There were two kitchen chairs for visitors, a radio, an electric fan for hot nights and an electric heater for cold ones. The fan was going now.
There are a lot of ways to put you in the picture, but generally Gresham just nails it to the floor with the least possible song and dance. Even the matters of existential conflict (and here he prefigures Hjortsberg's Falling Angel, shading the character's every move and introspection with palpable psychic jeopardy, soul-killing hazard), the author moves the narrative along rather than spinning out the melodrama.
If you have the least affection for the categories of pulp, noir, hard-boiled crime or their fellow travelers, I recommend this heartily, as one of the pillars of the genre.
September 12, 2017
"Find out what people are afraid of and then sell it back to them. "
Good advice if you're a politician, a quack religious leader, an ad man, or in this case, an inexperienced carny who learns to be a mind reader. It's just a short jump from that to being a spiritualist who reconnects gullible mourners to their dead relatives. People will believe anything if they want it bad enough.
I was really not expecting to like this book as much as I did, but it's a book from Kirk Smith's shelf that I wanted to read to honor his reading life, after his sudden death a couple of weeks ago. Noir is not one of my usual genres, but if they are all written this well, that could change. Yes, there is some cheesy 40's dialogue ( "Whadaya say we blow this joint, kid", that type of thing). But the author also had a pretty good eye and ear for some deep psychological insights into human nature that made this novel into something more than cheap pulp fiction. There were also a lot of great characters from the freak show tent that I'll remember for a while.
A great read. Thanks, Kirk.
Good advice if you're a politician, a quack religious leader, an ad man, or in this case, an inexperienced carny who learns to be a mind reader. It's just a short jump from that to being a spiritualist who reconnects gullible mourners to their dead relatives. People will believe anything if they want it bad enough.
I was really not expecting to like this book as much as I did, but it's a book from Kirk Smith's shelf that I wanted to read to honor his reading life, after his sudden death a couple of weeks ago. Noir is not one of my usual genres, but if they are all written this well, that could change. Yes, there is some cheesy 40's dialogue ( "Whadaya say we blow this joint, kid", that type of thing). But the author also had a pretty good eye and ear for some deep psychological insights into human nature that made this novel into something more than cheap pulp fiction. There were also a lot of great characters from the freak show tent that I'll remember for a while.
A great read. Thanks, Kirk.
February 15, 2019
An uppercut square in the gut, this story takes its time delivering the final blow. Essential crime-fiction.
April 11, 2021
“The rest of them drink something else: they drink promises. They drink hope. And I've got it to hand them.”
A brutally dark and raw novel, opening amidst the con games and dramas of a carnival freakshow and following a young man on his Icarus-like rise through the strata of more legitimate and institutionalized cons to a denouement which is as spectacular as it is inevitable. Author Gresham wrote only a handful of books, of which this is the first, and before ending his life suffered his own demons, many of which are readily apparent from reading this book. A new film version scheduled for December 2021 directed by Guillermo Del Toro and starring Bradley Cooper and Cate Blanchett may revive interest in this classic roman noir.
A brutally dark and raw novel, opening amidst the con games and dramas of a carnival freakshow and following a young man on his Icarus-like rise through the strata of more legitimate and institutionalized cons to a denouement which is as spectacular as it is inevitable. Author Gresham wrote only a handful of books, of which this is the first, and before ending his life suffered his own demons, many of which are readily apparent from reading this book. A new film version scheduled for December 2021 directed by Guillermo Del Toro and starring Bradley Cooper and Cate Blanchett may revive interest in this classic roman noir.
May 10, 2021
Ever since he was a kid Stan had had the dream. He was running down a dark alley, the buildings vacant and black and menacing on either side. Far down at the end of it a light burned, but there was something behind him, close behind him, getting closer until he woke up trembling and never reached the light.
Meet Stanton Carlisle, a young man who ran away from home to join a travelling carnival show, learning sleigh-of hand and card tricks, fast-talking his way out of trouble and blending into this world of confidence tricksters, muscle men, freaks and geeks.
The last term in particular holds the key to the novel: it means something different in the carny slang than the common use we have for it today. Gresham was inspired to write the novel when he heard the horrible story of degradation and abuse that can lead a man to perform gruesome acts in front of strangers in order to feed his craving for alcohol.
How helpless they all looked in the ugliness of sleep. A third of life spent unconscious and corpselike. And some, the great majority, stumbled through their waking hours scarcely more awake, helpless in the face of destiny. They stumbled down a dark alley toward their deaths. They sent exploring feelers into the light and met fire and writhed back again into the darkness of their blind groping.
Stan Carlisle is running away from his past, refusing to face his inner demons and hoping for a lucky break with his tricks. Gresham himself struggled all his life with similar demons, and the novel is probably his attempt to exorcise them using Freudian psychoanalysis and mental routines inspired by esoteric gurus like P. D. Ouspensky. This path puts him under the spell of the Tarot deck of cards known as the Major Arcana, a set of 21 numbered cards, plus a wild joker. These cards are used by the same confidence tricksters presented in the novel for divining the future. Gresham uses them as an illustration of the inflexible nature of Destiny: you cannot escape from your nightmare alley, no matter how fast you run. The novel has twenty-two chapters, each prefaced by a Tarot card, the whole story of the Great Stanton Carlisle bookmarked between The Fool and The Hanged Man, the chronicle of a predestined path for ‘the fool who walks in motley, with his eyes closed, over a precipice at the end of the world’
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A doomed Fate is standard fare for the ‘noir’ genre, but I was still impressed by the strength of Gresham’s presentation. The characters are memorable and believable, especially in the opening chapters at the “Ten-in-One” show. The language is in turns colourful, revealing about the secrets of the trade, passionate and lyrical, with the whole atmosphere getting darker and darker as the sanity of the narrator is eroded.
Dust when it was dry. Mud when it was rainy. Swearing, steaming, sweating, scheming, cheating, the carny went its way. It came like a pillar of fire by night, bringing excitement and new things into the drowsy towns – lights and noise and the chance to win an Indian blanket, to ride on the Ferris wheel, to see the wild man who fondles those reptiles as a mother would fondle her babes. Then it vanished in the night, leaving the trodden grass of the field and the debris of popcorn boxes and rusting tin ice-cream spoons to show where it had been.
Although a precise timeline is not given, Stan Carlisle and the other carnies are doing the small town circuit across the States after the Great Depression. They prey on the marks and they prey on their own partners, always looking for a chance to make a big score. Stanley is young and ambitious. He uses the mentalist Zeena to learn a better way to make his public open the purse:
For every unusual question there will be fifty that you have had before. Human nature is the same everywhere. All have the same troubles. They are worried. Can control anybody by finding out what he’s afraid of and hit them right where they live. Health, Wealth, Love. And Travel and Success. They’re all afraid of ill health, of poverty, of boredom, of failure. Fear is the key to human nature. They’re afraid ...
This knowledge gives Stan a sense of power over his marks, especially after he manages a ‘cold reading’ of a local cop. Abandoning Zeena and seducing the gorgeous but simple-minded Molly, the Great Stanton abandons his friends and aims at bigger game on the East Coast, refining his tricks and branching out into religion and spiritualism.
Folks are always crazy to have their fortunes told, and what the hell – You cheer ‘em up, give ‘em something to wish and hope for. That’s all a preacher does every Sunday. Not much different, being a fortuneteller and a preacher, way I look at it. Everybody hopes for the best and fears the worst and the worst is generally what happens but that don’t stop us from hoping. When you stop hoping you’re in a bad way.
It’s a cynical way to make a living, but looking at how things like horoscopes, palm-reading, paranormal activities and confidence tricks are still flourishing in today’s world, the link between fear and hope or the one between confidence men and religion remains valid and troublesome. Without going into any more revealing information about the plot, I was interested in particular by the author’s insight into the methods these crooks use to deceive their clients ( “Patent Ghost Thrower, complete with batteries and lenses, to hold 16 millimeter film, $7.98” from a spiritualists’ supply house in Chicago. ) and by the way he incorporates his own disillusionment with psychotherapy into the structure of the novel, with the introduction of Dr. Lilith Ritter, Consulting Psychologist.
What could anybody do for him? For anybody? They were all trapped, all running down the alley toward the light.
The theme of running away from your inner demons and the inevitability of failure link together the episodes in the career of the Great Stanton. For those who read the introduction by Nick Tosches, there is the added pain of knowing that the fate of William Gresham mirrors that of his main character much too closely for comfort. The man knew what he was talking about when he wrote this:
Man comes into the world a blind, groping mite. He knows hunger and the fear of noise and of falling. His life is spent in flight – flight from hunger and from the thunderbolt of destiny. From his moment of birth he begins to fall through the whistling air of Time: down, down into a chasm of darkness ...
[...]
What sense does it all make? What sort of God would put us here in this goddamned, stinking slaughterhouse of a world? some guy that likes to tear the wings off flies? What use is there in living and starving and fighting the next guy for a full belly? It’s a nut house. And the biggest loonies are at the top.
More than a pulp adventure, this novel explores human nature with the insight and the talent of the likes of Dostoevsky or Sartre. Highly recommended!
November 16, 2020
Bien podríamos decir que Stanton Carlisle, el protagonista de la novela, es primo hermano literario de Elmer Gantry, el personaje creado por Sinclair Lewis veinte años antes y que llegó a interpretar de forma admirable Burt Lancaster en 'El Fuego y la Palabra'.
Sin embargo, en esta novela, "El callejón de las Almas Perdidas" (y también en Stanton) se presiente un río subterráneo más oscuro y desesperanzado, un cúmulo fatalista de aguas estancadas que se arrastra negro y borboteante hasta quebrar la superficie con esa última frase inolvidable.
Una novela negra muy entretenida, con un uso frecuente de la elipsis que hace pensar más en el cine que en la literatura clásica, capaz de mezclar la vulgaridad de la vida sucia y a menudo inevitable con una reflexión sobre los caminos escogidos, sobre las posibilidades, los miedos y las adicciones, sobre ese juez que puede ser cada infancia, sobre la creencia en la magia, o sobre la ambición, el hastío y esa débil luz al final del túnel.
Un relato que su protagonista parece contarnos siempre desde el lado oscuro de la luna.
Otras notas:
William Lindsay Gresham consigue sin duda lo que busca. La última página es todo un uppercut a la mandíbula.
Emplea además ciertos recursos narrativos con gran acierto, entre ellos la retahíla de farfullas ebrias y neuróticas de Stanton, por las cuales percibimos la acción que se está desarrollando a través de sus sentidos maltrechos.
Y de vez en cuando, también nos encontramos pequeñas maravillas:
"La sala quedó tan en silencio como si acabaran de levantar la aguja de un tocadiscos".
Muy buena😎
Sin embargo, en esta novela, "El callejón de las Almas Perdidas" (y también en Stanton) se presiente un río subterráneo más oscuro y desesperanzado, un cúmulo fatalista de aguas estancadas que se arrastra negro y borboteante hasta quebrar la superficie con esa última frase inolvidable.
Una novela negra muy entretenida, con un uso frecuente de la elipsis que hace pensar más en el cine que en la literatura clásica, capaz de mezclar la vulgaridad de la vida sucia y a menudo inevitable con una reflexión sobre los caminos escogidos, sobre las posibilidades, los miedos y las adicciones, sobre ese juez que puede ser cada infancia, sobre la creencia en la magia, o sobre la ambición, el hastío y esa débil luz al final del túnel.
Un relato que su protagonista parece contarnos siempre desde el lado oscuro de la luna.
Otras notas:
William Lindsay Gresham consigue sin duda lo que busca. La última página es todo un uppercut a la mandíbula.
Emplea además ciertos recursos narrativos con gran acierto, entre ellos la retahíla de farfullas ebrias y neuróticas de Stanton, por las cuales percibimos la acción que se está desarrollando a través de sus sentidos maltrechos.
Y de vez en cuando, también nos encontramos pequeñas maravillas:
"La sala quedó tan en silencio como si acabaran de levantar la aguja de un tocadiscos".
Muy buena😎
October 11, 2022
By coincidence rather than design I seem to have read a run of post-war 1940’s American books of late, and my god are they grim. How that nation morphed into the shiny, bobby-socked, picket-fence of the following decade is anyone’s guess.
This is a world of users, scammers and people taking advantage of another’s misery to make a few dollars, although as usual those doing it on a small scale suffer disproportionate consequences compared to the industrialists and the wealthy who do exactly the same, albeit in a more subtly packaged way.
We start in the world of the carny. The travelling show which like a microcosm of the greater society has it’s echelons. Lowest of the low is ‘the freak’. The guy who the carny owner brags he can get to do the most depraved, demeaning act by feeding his alcoholism. Stanton Carlisle is a magician, mid-way in the pecking order below the mind-readers. He dreams of bigger, better things and accompanied by the bountiful Molly (every magician must have his glamorous assistant) he learns the mind-readers art and sets out on the road.
The mind-reading, morphs into mediumship and develops religious overtones when Stan sends away for a minister’s accreditation (the equivalent of buying a degree online today, I assume). His craft honed he plays the long game and sets up a grift on a wealthy industrialist whose murky past, and guilt, can be exploited.
To say more would be to ruin a good read. Not pleasant, not pretty but sometimes you’ve just got to get down and dirty in the mud. A book that will make you feel grubby but equally makes you feel that you’ve seen a truer slice of life than a Gene Kelly musical.
This is a world of users, scammers and people taking advantage of another’s misery to make a few dollars, although as usual those doing it on a small scale suffer disproportionate consequences compared to the industrialists and the wealthy who do exactly the same, albeit in a more subtly packaged way.
We start in the world of the carny. The travelling show which like a microcosm of the greater society has it’s echelons. Lowest of the low is ‘the freak’. The guy who the carny owner brags he can get to do the most depraved, demeaning act by feeding his alcoholism. Stanton Carlisle is a magician, mid-way in the pecking order below the mind-readers. He dreams of bigger, better things and accompanied by the bountiful Molly (every magician must have his glamorous assistant) he learns the mind-readers art and sets out on the road.
The mind-reading, morphs into mediumship and develops religious overtones when Stan sends away for a minister’s accreditation (the equivalent of buying a degree online today, I assume). His craft honed he plays the long game and sets up a grift on a wealthy industrialist whose murky past, and guilt, can be exploited.
To say more would be to ruin a good read. Not pleasant, not pretty but sometimes you’ve just got to get down and dirty in the mud. A book that will make you feel grubby but equally makes you feel that you’ve seen a truer slice of life than a Gene Kelly musical.
June 13, 2010
1. This afternoon, after finishing this book and having a great lunch with Karen I couldn't stop thinking about this song and about how in a roundabout way it reminded me of Nightmare Alley. I'm not going to do more than just share the video, which is kind of amusing in an almost hipster kind of way.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSdZ_y...
2. How to make a geek, paraphrased poorly from the first chapter of Nightmare Alley. Find a drunk who has no money and is suffering from the DT's. Tell him you need someone to stand in till the real geek is found. Instead of biting the heads off of chickens you have him fake it. Give him all the alcohol he needs. Once he's comfortable tell him that his time is up, he's going to be back on his ass, no money, no booze, with the DT's coming back hardcore. The locals aren't going to pay to see no fake assed geek, they want the real thing, so scram! Get going, hit the road drunko. He'll bite the head off of the chicken for real now and do any other degrading shit you want just to keep the bad shit of having no booze at bay.
3. Discussion question 1: What, if any, are the relations between the act of the drunk faking the geek act and having to become the geek, and the commonly known irony of hipsters and the point where they become the thing they have been ironically posing as. Are there certain hipsters that are really just being bred as a new slightly more sophisticated version of white trash?
4. What does all this hipster nonsense even have to do with a book about the rise and fall of a Carny / Con Artist?
I actually don't know exactly, but there are parallels here, or I'm just really obsessed today with hipsters for some inexplicable reason. I think it must be that there is some relation between this book and them, but maybe it's tenuous at best.
5. Discussion question 2: Free Will? Really? Explain.
6. Nightmare Alley is an interesting book about fatalism. The world exists as predestined, as the hands of the charlatan spiritualisms of the day. It just depends upon what form of naive quackery one chooses to believe; they all give an illusion of free-will, but with a strong current of 'everything is destined to work out better than fine' underneath. In reality there is no free-will, and nothing is going to be all right, alright? The spiritualism motifs are played out in the chapter titles which take their names from the major arcana of the tarot; which places an unchangeable force at work on a person. Everything has already been determined, now it's just up to you as the person on the ride to suffer on the ride.
Contrasted to this is a second view of history/life that also puts a person in the role of essentially passive actor caught up in a predetermined course of the world, but where eventually everything will all be better. This is seen in the communist agitator who shows up late in the book. With his specter looming in the same way Marx falsely prophesied the main character is confronted with someone who can possibly answer the questions of why life is such shit, why he (the main character) had to be such a shit to others and was so caught up in just trying to cheat people out of their money, and just like the dude in the video confronting Will Oldham on the L train to Manhattan for answers to life, the main character is left with no answers. He's just given another predetermined answer that leaves a person as a cog to be ground up in the movements of life.
I'd possibly say that the author didn't mean for this to be in the book, but rather meant for the labor agitator to be a sign post as a way out of the awfulness that people can do; but in reality it's just like someone switching from being a Catholic to a Protestant, at essence you are still believing in the same metaphysics with just a slight difference.
7. This review fails on just about every point. The reviewer enjoyed the book but couldn't get his muddled mind to focus on anything long enough to be coherent. Why would someone post crap like this? Is point seven really just a feeble attempt to get people to say something like; 'no, it's good, we like it', while he can be self-effacing? Could the ironic distance he just constructed by stating the last point be anymore nauseating? If he logically followed this distancing himself and washing his hands of all criticism to this style of ironic posturing, how long would he have to continue at it before he was successful?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSdZ_y...
2. How to make a geek, paraphrased poorly from the first chapter of Nightmare Alley. Find a drunk who has no money and is suffering from the DT's. Tell him you need someone to stand in till the real geek is found. Instead of biting the heads off of chickens you have him fake it. Give him all the alcohol he needs. Once he's comfortable tell him that his time is up, he's going to be back on his ass, no money, no booze, with the DT's coming back hardcore. The locals aren't going to pay to see no fake assed geek, they want the real thing, so scram! Get going, hit the road drunko. He'll bite the head off of the chicken for real now and do any other degrading shit you want just to keep the bad shit of having no booze at bay.
3. Discussion question 1: What, if any, are the relations between the act of the drunk faking the geek act and having to become the geek, and the commonly known irony of hipsters and the point where they become the thing they have been ironically posing as. Are there certain hipsters that are really just being bred as a new slightly more sophisticated version of white trash?
4. What does all this hipster nonsense even have to do with a book about the rise and fall of a Carny / Con Artist?
I actually don't know exactly, but there are parallels here, or I'm just really obsessed today with hipsters for some inexplicable reason. I think it must be that there is some relation between this book and them, but maybe it's tenuous at best.
5. Discussion question 2: Free Will? Really? Explain.
6. Nightmare Alley is an interesting book about fatalism. The world exists as predestined, as the hands of the charlatan spiritualisms of the day. It just depends upon what form of naive quackery one chooses to believe; they all give an illusion of free-will, but with a strong current of 'everything is destined to work out better than fine' underneath. In reality there is no free-will, and nothing is going to be all right, alright? The spiritualism motifs are played out in the chapter titles which take their names from the major arcana of the tarot; which places an unchangeable force at work on a person. Everything has already been determined, now it's just up to you as the person on the ride to suffer on the ride.
Contrasted to this is a second view of history/life that also puts a person in the role of essentially passive actor caught up in a predetermined course of the world, but where eventually everything will all be better. This is seen in the communist agitator who shows up late in the book. With his specter looming in the same way Marx falsely prophesied the main character is confronted with someone who can possibly answer the questions of why life is such shit, why he (the main character) had to be such a shit to others and was so caught up in just trying to cheat people out of their money, and just like the dude in the video confronting Will Oldham on the L train to Manhattan for answers to life, the main character is left with no answers. He's just given another predetermined answer that leaves a person as a cog to be ground up in the movements of life.
I'd possibly say that the author didn't mean for this to be in the book, but rather meant for the labor agitator to be a sign post as a way out of the awfulness that people can do; but in reality it's just like someone switching from being a Catholic to a Protestant, at essence you are still believing in the same metaphysics with just a slight difference.
7. This review fails on just about every point. The reviewer enjoyed the book but couldn't get his muddled mind to focus on anything long enough to be coherent. Why would someone post crap like this? Is point seven really just a feeble attempt to get people to say something like; 'no, it's good, we like it', while he can be self-effacing? Could the ironic distance he just constructed by stating the last point be anymore nauseating? If he logically followed this distancing himself and washing his hands of all criticism to this style of ironic posturing, how long would he have to continue at it before he was successful?
January 21, 2022
Kuglarze, spryciarze, cwaniaki, dziwaki i dziwolągi cyrkowe... całe to cwaniactwo jarmarczne w pełnej swojej krasie – to cały „Zaułek koszmarów”. Dodajmy do tego ten podejrzany blichtr – migające światełka, zapętloną muzykę, krzyki i szepty, które wciągają łatwowiernych w wir. Wszystko to skąpane w alkoholowym otępieniu, w rozpaczy ciemnych uliczek, w poszukiwaniu drogi, by przetrwać. Tylko tyle i aż tyle. Gresham stawia swoich bohaterów pod ścianą, nie daje im wyboru, a przynajmniej sprawia takie wrażenie. Staczają się w ciemność, coraz niżej, by sięgnąć dna i nie każdemu przyjdzie się z niego odbić. Depresja, brak nadziei, postępujący alkoholizm… Taki powojenny spleen, podskórna rozpacz, która rozlewa się im dalej wędrujemy po zaułku, im głębiej zanurzamy się w historię Stana.
Specyficzny język świetnie oddaje klimat desperacji, rosnącego lęku i tego poczucia, że nie ma z tej drogi ucieczki. Powieść Greshama czyta się czasami z fascynacją, czasami z obrzydzeniem. To mroczna historia, niepokojąca, ukazująca najmniej przyjemne aspekty ludzkiej natury z perspektywy kogoś, kogo nawet nie można do końca polubić. A sam finał historii nie pozostawia złudzeń.
Warto przeczytać, zanim obejrzymy ekranizację!
Specyficzny język świetnie oddaje klimat desperacji, rosnącego lęku i tego poczucia, że nie ma z tej drogi ucieczki. Powieść Greshama czyta się czasami z fascynacją, czasami z obrzydzeniem. To mroczna historia, niepokojąca, ukazująca najmniej przyjemne aspekty ludzkiej natury z perspektywy kogoś, kogo nawet nie można do końca polubić. A sam finał historii nie pozostawia złudzeń.
Warto przeczytać, zanim obejrzymy ekranizację!
June 18, 2017
"Stars, Millions of them. Space, reaching out into nothing. No end to it. The rotten, senseless, useless life we get jerked into and jerked out of, and it's nothing but whoring and filth from start to finish."
The narrator is conflicted, so I was a sure mark from the start. Psychologically realistic characters with believable backstories are presented with fine descriptive prose. Brilliant at times. Elegant and literary, mixed with cheese dialogue from the 1940s and lots of tits. Baby, it's Noir.
It features a fun, twisty plot with a satisfying ending that I didn't see coming. I recommend reading it quickly in big gulps (which should be easy to do). I was only able to read it in small segments over a long period of time but I still liked it a lot. Probably not for everyone and best to avoid if you're allergic to cheese and/or tits.
4.5 Dark Stars
The narrator is conflicted, so I was a sure mark from the start. Psychologically realistic characters with believable backstories are presented with fine descriptive prose. Brilliant at times. Elegant and literary, mixed with cheese dialogue from the 1940s and lots of tits. Baby, it's Noir.
It features a fun, twisty plot with a satisfying ending that I didn't see coming. I recommend reading it quickly in big gulps (which should be easy to do). I was only able to read it in small segments over a long period of time but I still liked it a lot. Probably not for everyone and best to avoid if you're allergic to cheese and/or tits.
4.5 Dark Stars
November 10, 2021
Hay cosas que me gustaron mucho, como la ambientación, esa sensación de film noir, algunos de los personajes y el final, aunque resulte un poco predecible.
Quedan algunos cabos sueltos, pero visto a la distancia, la historia me ha encantado, así que la subo a cinco estrellas.
Quedan algunos cabos sueltos, pero visto a la distancia, la historia me ha encantado, así que la subo a cinco estrellas.
January 22, 2020
4.5, rounded up.
I'll admit the impetus for reading this was finding out that Guillermo del Toro was adapting and directing a new all-star remake (Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, Rooney Mara, Willem Dafoe, Ron Perlman, Richard Jenkins) of the 1947 classic film noir about a carny con man ... but I had no idea what an unknown masterpiece this really is. Gresham knew the world he invokes intimately, and that insider knowledge shines from every page. There is an abundance of rich, fully realized characters ... hence, the cast del Toro was able to assemble to portray them.
I think the thing I appreciated most is that Gresham trusts his audience to work things out from little clues and hints, without hitting them over the head, so that you get to work out how each con works on your own. And the ending, which circles back to the very beginning of the book, has to be one of the most fantastic and satisfying on record. It really does deserve a wider audience, which hopefully the new film will provide.
I'll admit the impetus for reading this was finding out that Guillermo del Toro was adapting and directing a new all-star remake (Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Toni Collette, Rooney Mara, Willem Dafoe, Ron Perlman, Richard Jenkins) of the 1947 classic film noir about a carny con man ... but I had no idea what an unknown masterpiece this really is. Gresham knew the world he invokes intimately, and that insider knowledge shines from every page. There is an abundance of rich, fully realized characters ... hence, the cast del Toro was able to assemble to portray them.
I think the thing I appreciated most is that Gresham trusts his audience to work things out from little clues and hints, without hitting them over the head, so that you get to work out how each con works on your own. And the ending, which circles back to the very beginning of the book, has to be one of the most fantastic and satisfying on record. It really does deserve a wider audience, which hopefully the new film will provide.
February 25, 2022
Nightmare Alley’ by William Lindsay Gresham is a strikingly powerful noir novel! It is basically a character study of several amoral con artists, but the question for the author is how does a person become an amoral person? While several of the characters are a variety of unprincipled personalities who are along a spectrum of guilty feelings from a lot to none at all, the book follows one from when he was a young man until his middle age.
The novel was published in 1946, but it feels like the 1920’s to me because of the main character’s two scam specialities - first, he becomes a professional mentalist and later, a spiritualist.
Stanton Carlyle began his career as a child learning magic tricks. When he left home to escape an abusive father, he joined a carnival. At first he worked as a magician doing card tricks, but his real talent was in being a barker. What we today would call “talking shit” is a talent he used to interest people to stop and gamble on his sleight-of-hand tricks. But Stan is ambitious. He watches and makes friends with the other attractions hired by Clem Hoately, owner of the Ten-in-One show - Bruno Hertz, the strong man, Mary Margaret “Molly” Cahill, the electric lady, Madam Zeena, the mentalist, Joe Plasky, the Half-man Acrobat, Francis “Sailor” Martin, the living picture gallery (tattoos), Major Mosquito, a man who looks like a baby, and Pete the geek.
Stan aspires to learn the tricks of the mentalist trade from Zeena, but he cannot understand her husband, Pete. Pete’s job is to bite off the head of living chickens. When Stan questions Hoately about how on earth does one train for the job of geek, Hoately very gruffly clues him in.
”Hoately grabbed the youth by the shirt front and drew him nearer. “”Listen, kid, Do I have to draw you a damn blueprint? You pick up a guy and he ain’t a geek —he’s a drunk. A bottle-a-day booze fool. So you tell him like this: ‘I got a little job for you. It’s a temporary job. We got to get a new geek. So until we do you’ll put on the geek outfit and fake it.’ You tell him, ‘You don’t have to do nothing. You’ll have a razor blade in your hand and when you pick up the chicken you give it a nick with the blade and then make like you’re drinking the blood. Same with rats. The marks don’t know no different.””
Hoately ran his eye up and down the midway, sizing up the crowd. He turned back to Stan. “”Well, he does this for a week and you see to it that he gets his bottle regular and a place to sleep it off in. He likes this fine. This is what he thinks is heaven. So after a week you say to him like this, you say, ‘Well, I got to get me a real geek. You’re through.’ He scares up at this because nothing scares a real rummy like the chance of a dry spell and getting the horrors. He says, ‘What’s the matter? Ain’t I doing okay?’ So you say, ‘Like crap you’re doing okay. You can’t draw no crowd faking a geek. Turn in your outfit. You’re through.’ Then you walk away. He comes following you, begging for another chance and you say, ‘Okay. But after tonight out you go.’ But you give him his bottle.
“”That night you drag out the lecture and lay it on thick. All the while you’re talking he’s thinking about sobering up and getting the crawling shakes. You give him time to think it over, while you’re talking. Then throw in the chicken. He’ll geek.””
This is terrible on so many levels, gentle reader. Geeks were a real thing, an attraction many real carnivals used to have. The author learned about how carnivals worked and where men who worked as geeks came from by talking to someone who worked as a carny, Joseph Halliday. Gresham met Halliday while waiting for repatriation after fighting in the Spanish Civil War in 1939. How geeks were created disturbed Gresham so much he could never get it out of his mind.
I can’t either. Those of you who have followed my reviews since my early GR member days are aware I had a bad childhood. One of the reasons for this was I had an alcoholic parent. Chronic alcoholism can turn normal brains into a shrunken shadow of itself. For real. Many chronic alcoholics become like non-sentient robots following programming modules that allow them to imitate the person they used to be. Unfortunately, anyone who deals with one of these chronic drunks will pick up that some of the old brain programming that made them a person you loved years previously before the heavy drinking is now missing some of those modules. The alcohol very likely has deleted much of what used to be your loved one. I think it is because of the brain damage they sustain from alcoholism. The brains of alcoholics have what look like holes in their brain because they have shrunk. There is no recovery from the brain cell loss even if they recover from alcoholism.
While Stanton is the one followed by the author’s eye, in my humble opinion he is not the only amoral character in the novel. Stanton becomes familiar with many types of people in his wake as a fraud. There are quite a few bad people in the story, but I’ve noticed from other reviews of the novel it is only Stanton that most readers see as an antihero and the main creep. Actually, almost everyone Stanton works with is a scam artist or a thief. Some of Stanton’s gullible ‘marks’ are awful people, too. I suspect Gresham is explaining how we all can become geeks of one kind or another...
One of the things that make this book such an amazing one is Gresham goes into the backstory of some of the wicked and innocent characters. He shows us why these folks ended up doing the scams they do, or why they wanted to believe in the scams, whether they were people in the carnival or in business offices or rich ladies who lunch. Many of the characters are nice people, even though they scam others out of their money. Others are hardened past redemption. Some are mentally fragile, but they are able to hold it together until the mental dissonances or stress cracks them open psychologically. As usual, bad parenting is behind a lot of the cognitive impairments.
Gresham’s insight into the characters floored me, especially after I looked up his biography. Gresham underwent psychotherapy for his own demons. It’s possible Stanton’s demons are somewhat reflective of the author’s, idk.
My edition has an introduction by Nick Tosches. I suggest it be read after finishing the novel - it adds depth to the story. One of the interesting things I learned from Tosches’ introduction is this edition is the first uncensored one that is published. Gresham’s book is very raw and realistic. He also includes a lot of carny terms, which apparently was the first time the reading public ever knew about these words.
The novel was published in 1946, but it feels like the 1920’s to me because of the main character’s two scam specialities - first, he becomes a professional mentalist and later, a spiritualist.
Stanton Carlyle began his career as a child learning magic tricks. When he left home to escape an abusive father, he joined a carnival. At first he worked as a magician doing card tricks, but his real talent was in being a barker. What we today would call “talking shit” is a talent he used to interest people to stop and gamble on his sleight-of-hand tricks. But Stan is ambitious. He watches and makes friends with the other attractions hired by Clem Hoately, owner of the Ten-in-One show - Bruno Hertz, the strong man, Mary Margaret “Molly” Cahill, the electric lady, Madam Zeena, the mentalist, Joe Plasky, the Half-man Acrobat, Francis “Sailor” Martin, the living picture gallery (tattoos), Major Mosquito, a man who looks like a baby, and Pete the geek.
Stan aspires to learn the tricks of the mentalist trade from Zeena, but he cannot understand her husband, Pete. Pete’s job is to bite off the head of living chickens. When Stan questions Hoately about how on earth does one train for the job of geek, Hoately very gruffly clues him in.
”Hoately grabbed the youth by the shirt front and drew him nearer. “”Listen, kid, Do I have to draw you a damn blueprint? You pick up a guy and he ain’t a geek —he’s a drunk. A bottle-a-day booze fool. So you tell him like this: ‘I got a little job for you. It’s a temporary job. We got to get a new geek. So until we do you’ll put on the geek outfit and fake it.’ You tell him, ‘You don’t have to do nothing. You’ll have a razor blade in your hand and when you pick up the chicken you give it a nick with the blade and then make like you’re drinking the blood. Same with rats. The marks don’t know no different.””
Hoately ran his eye up and down the midway, sizing up the crowd. He turned back to Stan. “”Well, he does this for a week and you see to it that he gets his bottle regular and a place to sleep it off in. He likes this fine. This is what he thinks is heaven. So after a week you say to him like this, you say, ‘Well, I got to get me a real geek. You’re through.’ He scares up at this because nothing scares a real rummy like the chance of a dry spell and getting the horrors. He says, ‘What’s the matter? Ain’t I doing okay?’ So you say, ‘Like crap you’re doing okay. You can’t draw no crowd faking a geek. Turn in your outfit. You’re through.’ Then you walk away. He comes following you, begging for another chance and you say, ‘Okay. But after tonight out you go.’ But you give him his bottle.
“”That night you drag out the lecture and lay it on thick. All the while you’re talking he’s thinking about sobering up and getting the crawling shakes. You give him time to think it over, while you’re talking. Then throw in the chicken. He’ll geek.””
This is terrible on so many levels, gentle reader. Geeks were a real thing, an attraction many real carnivals used to have. The author learned about how carnivals worked and where men who worked as geeks came from by talking to someone who worked as a carny, Joseph Halliday. Gresham met Halliday while waiting for repatriation after fighting in the Spanish Civil War in 1939. How geeks were created disturbed Gresham so much he could never get it out of his mind.
I can’t either. Those of you who have followed my reviews since my early GR member days are aware I had a bad childhood. One of the reasons for this was I had an alcoholic parent. Chronic alcoholism can turn normal brains into a shrunken shadow of itself. For real. Many chronic alcoholics become like non-sentient robots following programming modules that allow them to imitate the person they used to be. Unfortunately, anyone who deals with one of these chronic drunks will pick up that some of the old brain programming that made them a person you loved years previously before the heavy drinking is now missing some of those modules. The alcohol very likely has deleted much of what used to be your loved one. I think it is because of the brain damage they sustain from alcoholism. The brains of alcoholics have what look like holes in their brain because they have shrunk. There is no recovery from the brain cell loss even if they recover from alcoholism.
While Stanton is the one followed by the author’s eye, in my humble opinion he is not the only amoral character in the novel. Stanton becomes familiar with many types of people in his wake as a fraud. There are quite a few bad people in the story, but I’ve noticed from other reviews of the novel it is only Stanton that most readers see as an antihero and the main creep. Actually, almost everyone Stanton works with is a scam artist or a thief. Some of Stanton’s gullible ‘marks’ are awful people, too. I suspect Gresham is explaining how we all can become geeks of one kind or another...
One of the things that make this book such an amazing one is Gresham goes into the backstory of some of the wicked and innocent characters. He shows us why these folks ended up doing the scams they do, or why they wanted to believe in the scams, whether they were people in the carnival or in business offices or rich ladies who lunch. Many of the characters are nice people, even though they scam others out of their money. Others are hardened past redemption. Some are mentally fragile, but they are able to hold it together until the mental dissonances or stress cracks them open psychologically. As usual, bad parenting is behind a lot of the cognitive impairments.
Gresham’s insight into the characters floored me, especially after I looked up his biography. Gresham underwent psychotherapy for his own demons. It’s possible Stanton’s demons are somewhat reflective of the author’s, idk.
My edition has an introduction by Nick Tosches. I suggest it be read after finishing the novel - it adds depth to the story. One of the interesting things I learned from Tosches’ introduction is this edition is the first uncensored one that is published. Gresham’s book is very raw and realistic. He also includes a lot of carny terms, which apparently was the first time the reading public ever knew about these words.
December 29, 2017
”All have the same troubles. They are worried. Can control anybody by finding out what he’s afraid of. Works with question-answering act. Think out things most people are afraid of and hit them right where they live. Health, Wealth, Love. And Travel and Success. They’re all afraid of ill health, of poverty, of boredom, of failure. Fear is the key to human nature. They’re afraid…”
I can’t begin to say how dark this story is.
Stanton “Stan” Carlisle is a mentalist, who uses his powers on a carny that travels to all corners of America. This story follows Stan as he develops his powers, all the while looking for the perfect “mark” that will make him his fortune.
I felt a deep heaviness while reading the book, as if I wasn’t reading it alone. Not a scary feeling per se, more of an underlying eeriness.
It’s incredible to think that this book was written back in 1946, as it doesn’t seem particularly dated. It is as an absolute noir classic.
I can’t begin to say how dark this story is.
Stanton “Stan” Carlisle is a mentalist, who uses his powers on a carny that travels to all corners of America. This story follows Stan as he develops his powers, all the while looking for the perfect “mark” that will make him his fortune.
I felt a deep heaviness while reading the book, as if I wasn’t reading it alone. Not a scary feeling per se, more of an underlying eeriness.
It’s incredible to think that this book was written back in 1946, as it doesn’t seem particularly dated. It is as an absolute noir classic.
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