Nightmare Alley

THIS queer, tough, colorful novel combines the biography of a scoundrel with the exposure of half a dozen pseudomagical rackets. As a study in psychotic villainy, it is lively but not particularly impressive. As a source of information on sleight of hand, mind reading, mental telepathy, conversing with spirits, raising the dead, and cleaning a chump, it is invaluable.

Mr. Gresham’s hero has agile fingers and a gift for character reading. Stan’s desire for money, backed by tremendous ingenuity and intelligence, carries him to prosperity as a spiritualist preacher. The Oedipus complex (yes, that thing again) with which Mr. Gresham has afflicted him leads him to psychotic ruin.

Stan begins as a magician with a small carnival, where he learns how to run a “mental act” from Zeena, who is a motherly mistress. He leaves Zeena and the carnival for a vaudeville mind-reading act; then drifts from that into necromancy and spiritualism because the cash seems to be more plentiful and the customers more gullible. Stan is a vast success as the self-ordained minister of the Church of the Heavenly Message until his psychosis begins to get out of hand. Then he consults a woman psychiatrist, a frankly improbable creature who becomes his mistress and the master mind in a plot to relieve an elderly millionaire of some surplus profits. He winds up with a small carnival, being offered the post of “substitute geek“ (temporary wild man). The pleasant angle of this situation is that Stan knows, from early experience, that the substitute geek always becomes a permanent geek.

The book’s great fascination lies less in what happens to Stan, who is, in spite of some pathetic moments, a humorless, egotistical rogue, than in the people he meets and the revelations of his trade. The early carnival scenes are full of detailed information on how to make a geek how to stop a riot, how to soothe a deputy sheriff’s conscience, how to run a mind-reading act. When Stan becomes the proprietor of a religion, all the tricks of the fake spiritualist are dissected — the buttons, bells, lights, and recordings which will produce anything from a small piece of ectoplasm to a materialization of dear dead Aunt Genevieve, with sound effects.

Mr. Gresham knows how all these sucker traps are baited and what kind of people get caught. He contrives a procession of the lonely, the guilty, the grief-stricken, and the plain cracked which is a rather horrifying report, on humanity.

The book’s weakness, in the end, is the predominance of characters who never can be honest and sane simultaneously. Like Stan, they are all wanderers down some dark alley of the mind, and like Stan, they are somewhat remote from ordinary life.Nightmare Alley is built of concrete detail, careful observation, and realistic reporting; but it has none of the effect of a realistic novel. It is the chronicle of a dreamworld, to be read with interest and marveled over, but it engages one’s sympathy no more than a corpse in the movies.

PHOEBE LOU ADAMS