Customer Reviews

Nightmare Alley (New York Review Books)

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3 star:		(2)
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Follows the 20-or-so year career of Stanton Carlisle, from carny sleight-of-hand artist, to vaudeville mentalist, to (in)famous spiritualist, as he squares his broad shoulders and strides proudly through life, taking what he wants - and revenging some old injuries - until, in search of that one really big score, he falls in with a partner even more ruthless than himself. The title refers to the key to any good con, every man's flight from his innermost fears. Carlisle learns early to "find out what they're afraid of." Supporting characters are (mostly) colorful and real. The narrative changes moods at times, from straight journalistic style to stream-of-consciousness a-la the young John Dos Passos, all used effectively. This novel is available with five others of its kind in "Crime Novels, American Noir of the 30s and 40s," published by Library of America, and worth every cent of the $35 list price.

Although largely forgotten today, Gresham's NIGHTMARE ALLEY was one of the great bestsellers of the 1940s--a grotesque tale of the rise of a Stanton Carlisle, a carny worker who moves up from bilking rubes at a traveling ten-in-one show to become a fake spiritualist bilking the rich and famous in an church elaborately rigged to support his fake senances. But success is fleeting, and Stan falls prey to the very insecurities that have driven him to success. When it comes, his fall has all the horror of being dropped into a blast furnace.

Gresham writes in a tough-voiced pulp fiction tone that lingers over the most unsavory aspects of the story--sometimes to the point of nausea--and the result is a harsh vision of the world as a "nightmare alley," a one-way run with unseen hounds hell after you and death when you meet the brick wall at the end. The characters are memorable: the glib-tongued Stan, embroiled in his own Freudian hell; the hardknocks but likeable Zeena, a carny psychic who starts Stan on his career; the pretty but stupid Molly, who becomes Stan's unwilling partner in crime; and, always lurking somewhere in the background, the carny geek, the ultimate portrait in degredation and desperation, a monsterous man-made grotesque whose image frames the novel.

The novel is deliberately disorienting, and each new section of the book is heralded by the use of a Tarot card to remarkable effect. NIGHTMARE ALLEY is powerful stuff, and it shouldn't be read on an empty stomach. Recommended, but brace yourself: when you pick up the book you'll find yourself on an express elevator, and it's straight down all the way.

Gresham writes a suspenseful and "not so nice" story about Stanton Carlisle -- a young man who starts his working career in freak / carnival show. Stanton and his friends travel around the country bilking people into believing that Stan can predict the future. Gresham reveals the tricks of the trade as he shows how fortunetellers and mind readers conduct their business.

Stanton wants the big time action and he has the ability to go far. He is glib, charismatic and a skilled cold fortuneteller. After marrying fellow carnival worked Molly, he and she go to work acquiring larger targets. After becoming a mail-order minister, they conduct seances and allow rich people to communicate with the dead. Stanton and Molly and rewarded handsomely. However, even that isn't enough as Stan pushes his luck and goes after a major capitalist in order to clear huge amounts of money.

The gritty writing is similar James M. Cain's (Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice) and is unafraid to reveal the characters' seedier nature. The format of the book is also clever -- showing Stanton's rise to power (and ultimate demise) through the use of tarot cards at the start of each chapter. My only complaint was that it was sometimes hard to follow. I found that at the start of almost every chapter I felt a sense of disorientation until I figured out what was going on. The continuity was weak. However, I liked the book tremendously -- especially when it revealed Stanton's ruses.

The excellent movie with Tyrone Power isn't currently available -- too bad. It was written by the greatest Hollywood writer, Jules Furthman, who trimmed away some of Gresham's more baroque touches and flatulent moralizing (and gave it a great last line, until Darryl Zanuck softened the ending). As for the book itself, it's a blistering portrait of hubris and its consequences, and some of the writing (the early description of the geek at work) is as tough and uncompromising as any American writing ever. An unforgettable experience.

I read this book recently and I also saw the movie with Tyrone Power. In my opinion the book is far superior. It is tough and unapologetic, and in my opinion represents the character of Stanton Carlisle as it really would be given his upbringing and interests. Carlisle is a mean carney, always on the lookout to better himself whether at someone else's expense or through his own cleverness. He takes what he wants when he wants it, and his rise and fall is honest and interesting.

On the other hand, the movie version of "Nightmare Alley" has too many Hollywood touches and comes across as dishonest. In the movie Carlisle is truly in love with his wife and does what he does for her benefit as well as his own. This is nice and all, but it comes across as very, very phoney since we already know quite a bit about Carlisle's ruthlessness and selfishness. And there's a happy ending in the movie. The book ends unhappily but honestly, and the ending is foreshadowed by earlier events. The one thing to recommend the movie is Tyrone Power's performance, which is only bettered, in my opinion, by his wonderful role as the rich aristocrat in "Son of Fury."

This amazing, grim novel is the ideal noir, in film or literature. If you like the tropes, gestures and sheer style of noir, then you can't go wrong with this book, because they are there in almost every line, every element of plot, especially the long denoument which is both foreseeable and satisfying. This is a great novel of the kind and of the period. If you giggle at the dialogue of "The Big Sleep," then you'll find this book satisfying.

If you're a different sort of reader though, who loves the beauty of the dialogue of "The Big Sleep," for whom noir is as much about ideas and a point of view, then you'll find this book a masterpiece. It's easy to call the book cynical, but it's not at all - the main character is cynical, and he both exploits that cynicism and is trapped by it, and his cynicism reflects that found in American society. Noir stories improvise their own sets of morals and values and, if the stories work, those ideas makes sense in the context, and in "Nightmare Alley" they work brilliantly and with great power. The book is as grim as it gets, but the power of Gresham's writing makes it almost relentlessly gripping; his lines and dialogue are excellent, and so is his structure. The pacing is excellent, the characterizations are not just effective but creatively done - these are real people, even the minor figures - and the overall shape, the way Gresham places his chapters, is terrific. His subject and context may be pulpy, but the writing is deeply skillful and without cliché. And what is perhaps most exciting and satisfying is that Gresham goes, without fear and sensationalism, so deeply into the possibilities of human cynicism and depravity, far deeper than even Jim Thompson, and that is what noir is all about. In it's own way, this is a great American novel.

By far, one of the finest novels to come from one of the most memorable 'literary' eras of American History.Fans of Cornell Woolrich and James Cain will surely find this novel, set amid a band of carnies, as involving as I Married a Dead Man or Postman Always Rings Twice. Gresham, like his contemporary, Horace McCoy, is regarded as a peripheral writer within the era. After reading this novel, however, one finds this assumption faulty. Gresham has a keen sense for writing effective and elegant prose. This book is NOT like the film "Freaks", for it is a deeper analysis of the disaffected temperment of one man, Stanton Carlisle, whose need for domination and power takes precedence over his sense of humanity. He tramples over that which blocks his path, resulting in his moral deevolution and eventual fall from grace. This novel, Nightmare Alley, represents the finest of the truly American literary art form, the Hard-Boiled crime novel.

This is an amazing little book, written in the saucy vernacular of the time. If for no other reason "Nightmare Alley" is famous for introducing the term "geek" to American culture.

Having been raised a backwoods fundamentalist, this book struck close to home with sophisticated cons consisting of pregnant promises, and hope deferred. I credit the book with providing one of the last nails in the coffin of my faith. Ah, the freedom and relief!

If you liked this book, you might also like "Don't Call Me Brother : A Ringmaster's Escape from the Pentecostal Church," by Austin Miles. Miles' (named after the man who wrote 'I Come to the Garden Alone') story is similar but true.

The contradiction in Nightmare Alley, and all other cons, is that to execute a successful con you have to believe your own story to at least a minimal degree, and once you do that you'll fall for anything.

Back in the late 1890s, a there was a fashionable literary style called (after a book by Horatio Alger),"Luck and Pluck". These books were intended to serve as primers in morality for young boys and often contrasted some lazy ne'er do well character with a hard-working, resolute, charming and strong-willed boy whose perseverance propelled him from poverty to big success. Naturally, this presents authors of a more realistic or cynical bent to create anti-heroes who follow a sort of reverse trajectory (e.g. Nathanial West's, "Dream Life of Balso Snell). A parallel movement was found in pulp detective tales of the era, some with moral men following their destinies and others acting as just plain bad men. Desolation Row (sorry, Bob) type tales of desperate men in dour surroundings living depraved lives also became marginally popular, Jim Thompson's books being well-known examples. Gresham and Thompson were likely the best novelists working the psychology of those on the dark side of town and while Thompson has become famous, Gresham is still largely unknown. "Nightmare Alley", popular when first written (even spawning a film version), became obscure as its contents probably didn't mesh too well with the Eisenhower-era attitudes

"Nightmare Alley", written in the late 1940s, sets scene in the opening sequence with a starkly realistic portrayal of carnival life (at least as I imagine it). Observing at slight remove is aspiring card trickster, Stanton Carlysle, whose story this book is. Carlysle, talented but "misdirected", had a modestly privileged but generally miserable upbringing, one which left a series of unhealed psychological scars. Carlysle cynically but accurately pegs most everyone he encounters and plays them for his own ends, never really connecting on an emotional basis, save for one telling liason with a female psychologist in the book's final third. Carlysle follows the anti-Alger trajectory from poverty to relative wealth to oblivion, all-the-while missing the social acceptance he pointedly seems to crave (see the scene where he is performing in a rich woman's home and is pointedly reminded of his social station). The outcome of Carlysle's story is predictable, but that only adds to the depressing aura of the book: you are aware of it, Carlysle, with his self-destructive personality and penchant for playing the odds, is probably aware of it and the author adroitly develops that angle to increase tension and further permeate the story with despair.

Despite being published in the waning years of the Golden Age of pulp writers, this is not in that class. Despite the setting, one crying out for a "noir" tale, this book is not a genre novel but is is a dark story. In my estimation, Gresham easily joins Jim Thompson in the front rank on the shady side of the psychological novel street.

Literary fame has flitted all around William Lindsay Gresham. His name has become associated with C.S. Lewis and Edgar Alan Poe -- although not for reasons you might imagine. He gained a connection to Lewis when his second wife (poet Joy Davidman) left him for the Oxford don after Gresham broke a bottle over the head of one of his sons and discharged rifles into the ceiling during fits of rage. Comparisons to Poe came not only because of his writings' macabre subject matters, but because the Baltimore-born author also killed himself with drugs (sleeping pills, rather than Poe's alcohol). Unfortunately, precious little of that fame landed on Gresham's books. A shame, especially concerning Nightmare Alley, a noir novel both expertly crafted and chilling as the grave.

Stan Carlisle learned the most important lesson of his life during that first season with the Ackerman-Zorbaught Monster Shows: Learn what the mark's afraid and what he wants. If you know those two things (and they're usually intertwined) you own him. That was how the carnival owner trained the drunken geek to eat live animals. He knew the man wanted liquor more than anything, knew the thought of living without the buzz was worse than taking his teeth to a chicken's head. Paying him in whiskey was cheap. And that lesson stuck with Stan, propelled him from being a carny magician to a fraudulent psychic who can charm the dollar bills out of his clients' pockets. But the very thing that propels Stan's rise will also stop it, because he doesn't know what he wants -- or what he truly fears.

Nightmare Alley reads almost exactly like a classical tragedy, only with lots of detours through the worst side streets of early 20th century America. Although Gresham handles his subject matter with what today would be called a delicate hand, he doesn't shy away from gritty topics. Aside from the geek's animal mutilation, there's bare-handed murder, death via back-alley abortion, abominable mental manipulation by the nastiest femme fatale you've ever met, attempted suicide with a pair of nail scissors and a cringe-inducing scene involving prostitution. You get the idea: It ain't pretty. But therein lies its power. Today, pop culture often has us sympathize with the suave trickster, has us cheer him for his ingenuity. We don't do that with Stan. Nightmare Alley's closing moments horrify, but it's a dry-eyed affair. One doesn't weep when a great fraud brings the evil he visited on others back onto his own head.