Monster Midway by William Lindsay Gresham

Gresham admiring the midway

William Lindsay Gresham's first novel was his most famous. Nightmare Alley was published in 1946 and adapted into a movie in 1947. An unsuccessful and now forgotten second novel followed in 1949. It was seven years after the publication of Nightmare Alley, in 1953, that Gresham published his third book, Monster Midway, a non-fiction collection of essays about the world of the carnivals. His most famous novel had, in fact, been born of a lifelong fascination with carnies, psychics, and magicians. Gresham shared that fascination in Monster Midway.

Review

Perhaps the most notorious passage from the novel and both movie versions is the sequence where Clem Hoatley explains to Stanton Carlisle how a geek is made. In the opening pages of Monster Midway, Gresham tells us how he learned this bit of carny lore. Gresham, like many young men in his generation, volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War. As he was waiting to muster out of the conflict, he got to know a fellow American who shared his interest in carnival life. "Clem Faraday was a sergeant of medics and my immediate superior... And he was also an old-time carny." The real Clem, it turns out, had worked a ten-in-one in the South that featured a geek show as a blowoff. (If I just confused you with some of that carny lingo, don't worry; the book includes a glossary.) When Gresham pressed for more information about the geek, Clem launched into the explanation of how you find an alcoholic or an ex-soldier who's addicted to morphine and use his addiction to gradually lure him into full-on geeking. That speech went straight into Nightmare Alley.

Each chapter in the book details a different aspect of carny life. Early in, Gresham goes into some detail describing the business side of running a carnival, which I admit I found a little boring; but he quickly moves on to describing the rides, the games, the freaks, the gypsy mind-readers, the motordromes and hell drivers, fire eaters, sword swallowers, snake handlers, and other exciting sides of the carnies. He devotes a long chapter to Houdini and other escape artists. (Houdini would be the subject of Gresham's next book.) Throughout, Gresham treats the reader to glimpses behind the scenes, explaining how it all works, and even revealing the secrets of some of the gaffs and grifts. Want a roadmap for doing the psychic mind-reader act? Gresham gives it to you.

All of his stories are backed up by interviews with real-life carnies, whose names Gresham shares. The chapter on freaks is revealing because it's clear that Gresham had gotten to know many of them personally, and many wisely used the money they earned in the carnies to build comfortable, normal lives for themselves afterward. Gresham also shares tales of how he tried out doing mind-reading and magic acts on his own, gaining some first-hand experience. It all adds up to a fascinating memoir of a world that is long gone. The carnivals, fairs, circuses, and amusement parks that exist today are far more wholesome and legit than the shows that would scrounge their way across America back in the days of the Depression and the War.

An informative article about Gresham's life and career can be found in The Writer's Chronicle from June 2006: awpwriter.org/magazine/writers/aprendergast01.htm.