NIGHTMARE ALLEY
Bleak stories with damaged characters mark noir, but few tales rival the hopeless and cruel hellscape that is NIGHTMARE ALLEY by William Lindsay Gresham.
At the onset, we meet a ruined alcoholic who’s lost all dignity and barely grasps onto his humanity. Alone, this is tragic, but it gets worse when a carny uses the man’s addiction to turn him into an appalling sideshow: a geek — a man who bites the heads off live chickens and snakes.
This grisly spectacle sets the stage for Stanton Carlisle, a budding con man who joins the carnival and learns the ropes, shaping his talent for deception into a trajectory that no mother would approve. Except for, maybe, Stanton’s.
Much like how we inhabit the mind of a serial killer in Dorothy B. Hughes' novel IN A LONELY PLACE, Gresham pulls us into the inner sanctum of a ruthless con. We travel with Stanton as he goes from carny to mentalist to society pet to Reverend of the Church of the Heavenly Message. We witness his machinations as he manipulates everyone and everything to his advantage, gaining power, notoriety, and wealth.
But the big payoff isn’t what he bargained for. And it turns out in NIGHTMARE ALLEY, fate is indeed a cruel mistress.
As Nick Tosches points out in his excellent introduction to NIGHTMARE ALLEY (also published here), Gresham used Tarot cards from the major arcana to structure the novel. Gresham begins the first chapter with the fool, but then he shuffles the deck.
One wonders how he arrived at this sequence of cards, whether it was intentionally plotted or perhaps conceived in a dark room, faint with sulfur, a candle guttering while a spread is laid out on a table. A hushed voice tells a wretched story ending with the hanged man.
***
I first encountered the Tarot when I was an 18-year-old waitress. A bartender gave me a reading, and I became fascinated with the cards and the stories behind them.
At that time, I believed a spirit was whispering my past and future, but my perspective has since changed. I’m not dismissing psychic phenomenon, because, truthfully, I do believe. However, on this earthly plane, I find that the Tarot is superb for focusing impressions and memories for self-reflection.
Like myths, the Tarot presents the receiver with relatable universal themes. In the context of hustling, though, it’s priceless. Gresham describes why here:
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. Works with questioning-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.
Find out what they are afraid of and sell it back to them. That’s the key.
***
NIGHTMARE ALLEY is desolate and dark, brutal and hopeless. And it’s been made into a movie twice—the first in 1947, directed by Edmund Goulding and starring Tyrone Power as Stanton Carlisle.
Guillermo del Toro adapted the film again in 2021. This storyline is closer to the novel, monstrous and violent, starring Bradley Cooper and a smoldering Cate Blanchett, who steals more than the screen.
Whether you check out the movies or the novel, prepare yourself for an indelible story, best described by Gresham himself:
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.
