Nightmare Alley

[Dave Monroe]

Nightmare Alley
By William Lindsay Gresham
Introduction by Nick Tosches


Nightmare Alley begins with an extraordinary description of a
freak-show geek—alcoholic and abject and the object of the voyeuristic
crowd's gleeful disgust and derision—going about his work at a county
fair. Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a
man could fall so low. There's no way in hell, he vows, that anything
like that will ever happen to him.

And since Stan is clever and ambitious and not without a useful streak
of ruthlessness, soon enough he's going places. Onstage he plays the
mentalist with a cute bimbo (before long his harried wife), then he
graduates to full-blown spiritualist, catering to the needs of the
rich and gullible in their well-upholstered homes. It looks like the
world is Stan's for the taking. At least for now.

http://www.nybooks.com/shop/product?usca_p=t&product_id=9431

Nightmare Alley (1947)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0039661/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idlYaKQ1yjw
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nightmare_Alley_%28film%29

Nightmare Alley (1947)

The movie is a realization of a novel of William Lindsay Gresham with
the same name. In context to most "movies with Tarot" the plot is
really based on a related divination topic, the truthsayer activity in
carnival show business. Although Tarot appears only in one scene, it
has a remarkable truthsaying context, predicting the death of one of
the players. Really worth a longer look.

Interestingly the deck used in the movie (made 1947, 20th Century Fox
in the U.S.) is a Rider-Waite deck - long before the Rider-Waite
dominated the Tarot scene.

http://a-tarot.eu/090901/25.php

On the other hand, each chapter of the novel is titled with a tarot
card title, plus image an quote.  The novel's epigraphs are from The
Waste-Land and The Satyricon ....

And see as well, e.g., ...

http://thehoundblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/william-lindsay-gresham.html

http://www.booksintofilms.com/support-files2/nighmare.alley.htm

But wait, there's more ...

Nightmare Alley (2010)

http://www.nightmarealleythemusical.com/