BY G. CONNOR SALTER
Nightmare Alley. Adapted by Spain Rodriguez from the novel by William Lindsay Gresham. Introduction by Gay Groth. Fantagraphics Books, 2003.
What does it take to get a movie made?
A friend was asking me this after we had watched Guillermo del Toro’s adaptation of Nightmare Alley. My friend is a specialist in the Inkling Charles William, a writer whose work Gresham reviewed and promoted.[1] Gresham had other connections to the Inklings (his wife went on to marry C.S. Lewis). Like Gresham, Williams is under-read, and she was curious about using movie adaptations to get his work out there.
I pointed out that usually movies cost millions (60 million in this particular case), so timing is everything. There have been two adaptations of Nightmare Alley (1947, 2021), both made by powerful people making the right deals when they had the most influence to get a passion project made. Actor Tyrone Power had made millions playing swashbuckling heroes and wanted to make Nightmare Alley so he could expand into more complicated roles. Guillermo del Toro wanted to make Nightmare Alley for years, and had the right leverage after winning an Oscar for The Shape of Water. Neither movie made money at the box office, although both have gone on to become cult favorites.
Given these factors, I told my friend it is usually better not to hope for the movie version. Hold out for something like the audiobook or the graphic novel. Those are much easier to make.
Two weeks after this conversation, I discovered that even making a graphic novel of Nightmare Alley is not easy.
The graphic novel version of Nightmare Alley was published in 2003, written and illustrated by Spain Rodriguez. Gary Groth explains in his introduction that the plan to adapt Nightmare Alley began in 1991 (iv, non-paginated). At that time, Art Spiegelman, author of the Pulitzer-winning Maus, was working with independent publisher Bob Callahan to release adaptations of various crime novels to be distributed by Avon Books (ibid). Avon’s Neo Lit: Noir Illustrated series came into being and published two graphic novels. City of Glass (based on the novella by Paul Astor) appeared in 1994, and Perdita Durango (based on a story in Sailor’s Holiday by Barry Gifford) appeared in 1995. Tom DeHaven began writing a script for Nightmare Alley to be illustrated by Mark Zingarelli, but “a personal tragedy cut his involvement abruptly short” (vi, non-paginated).
Underground comics artist Spain Rodriguez then became involved, deciding he would adapt Nightmare Alley from his own script. New problems arose when Avon Books canceled the project in 1996. It eventually found a home at Fantagraphics Books.
“As soon as Fantagraphics Books, who published two of Spain’s collections in the ’90s (Trashman and My True Story, as well as his short stories in the anthology Blab!) picked the book up in 2001, Spain set down and finished the book, the longest single work of his career. All told, Spain spent seven years working on it, on and off. All told, more artists have worked on adapting Nightmare Alley, adapting it into more media, than just about any work of fiction.”
Gary Groth, introduction to Nightmare Alley (vi, non-paginated)
The last statement is debatable, but Groth has a point. Yes, classics like The Three Musketeers have been adapted into more media than Nightmare Alley. However, adaptations of well-recognized classics attract funding more easily than underground classics, and few of these adaptations stall during production to be taken up years later. Almost every version of Nightmare Alley (the movies, the 2010 musical by Jonathan Brielle, the graphic novel) has taken a great deal of work, and gone through multiple obstacles.[2] Gresham has not been an easy writer to adapt. He hasn’t even been an easy writer to study. As of this writing, two planned Gresham biographies (one by Nick Tosches, another by Perry Bramlett) never made it to print because the authors passed away before finishing their work.
So. We have passed 20 years since this hard-won graphic novel adaptation by Rodriguez appeared. Was the wait worth it?
As a whole, I would say yes.
As in the source novel, Nightmare Alley follows Stanton Carlisle, a carnival worker with some surprising coworkers. Strongman Bruno, who is too shy to admit he has a crush on Molly, a girl who does an electricity act. Madame Zeena, the married (but lonely) psychic whose husband invented the perfect mentalist act. Zeena’s husband Pete, once a great performer but now a shadow of his former self who spends all his time drinking. Stan pilfers the mentalist act from Zeena, and takes Molly along to strike it rich on the vaudeville circuit. The couple proceeds from vaudeville to posh nightclubs, before Stan rebrands himself as a Spiritualist minister. After a stint hosting spiritualist meetings at a house rigged with gadgets to mimic ghostly phenomena, the increasingly control-prone Stan meets psychiatrist Dr. Lillith Ritter. She helps him stabilize, and then reveals a way they can complete the con job of a lifetime.
Readers familiar with the novel will notice at this point that Rodriguez follows the original plot more closely than other adaptations. There are moments where this commitment to the source presents a problem. One of the more interesting passages in the book is Bruno thinking about how much he likes Molly, but is too shy to do anything. This could be interesting, but Gresham never develops Bruno’s love to produce an engaging plot complication. He never threatens Stan, never makes overtures to Molly. Both movies handle this problem by making Bruno an older man with a foster-father attachment to Molly. Both movies make him a foil to Stan, the jealous father who doesn’t trust the young punk. It’s a case where deviating from the book helps, by cultivating something more interesting than the original story.
On the other hand, because Rodriguez keeps the novel’s three part structure intact, he maintains a fascinating section that appears in neither film. Both films show Stan as a nightclub entertainer being approached by people who think his powers are genuine. They skip the years he spent as a Spiritualist minister, moving directly from Stan’s entertainer years to meeting Ritter. Both films make the jump work, and it’s easy to see why they omit the second act: it adds literal years to the narrative. Only a limited series could cover all of the novel’s material.
A graphic novel has less space restrictions than a movie, so Rodriguez takes more time. Minor incidents are cut here and there, but he provides the full epic story of Stan’s rise to greater crimes. In fact, epic is the right word: Gresham’s story may not have the romanticism of an F. Scott Fitzgerald story, but he is not too different from Jay Gatsby. This is also a tale about a man who reinvents himself to get what he wants (in this case, money). He takes the American dream project to places the founders never expected, but we can’t help but remember this is how so many American entrepreneurs made their names: bending the rules, moving fast, not caring who they stepped on along the way.[3]
The largest change Rodriguez makes is perhaps the one thing that’s really a flaw in his treatment. The novel features some fairly strong sexual material, enough that it was banned or censored in various places for decades. However, other than one or two scenes that describe naked women, Gresham rarely communicates by showing anatomical details.
Even when Gresham’s novel turns to the manipulative affair Ritter has with Stan, he seems more interested in the power dynamics, and in the subtle Jewish imagery, likely suggested by his then-wife Joy Davidman, than in the sex. The most interesting thing about Ritter is not her body, but how much she functions like a monster (Lillith by name and by nature) to get ahead in a man’s world. Her monster status may make her an unredeemed sibling to another female manipulator influenced by Davidman. After their divorce, Davidman married C.S. Lewis and she offered feedback on his novel Till We Have Faces, a Greek myth tale following a cynical woman named Orual who uses manipulation to get ahead in a man’s world.[4]
Where Gresham emphasizes the mind games, Rodriguez doubles down on the sexual imagery. Occasionally, his choices are clever. For example, the novel features a scene in which Ritter sits in her bathrobe while Stan paints her toenails. Rodriguez pictures the scene as her wearing undergarments while standing on a stepstool, pointing at Stan as he kneels. Gresham expert Diego Domingo has mentioned that the layout emulates 1950s Dominatrix artwork, conveying the power dynamics at play.[5] More provocative, but also more gratuitous. Other scenes in the graphic novel are explicit without adding much to the story.
Curiously, this emphasis on nudity raises a good question about noir fiction. Most writers of Gresham’s generation had to deal with levels of censorship, whether their stories appeared in magazines, books, or movies. The writers worked with the limits by playing tricks that left readers with just enough information, not enough for anyone to call them obscene. That balancing act became a fundamental, even attractive, part of noir. It made the stories devious, sly. Even in the 2010 uncensored edition by The New York Review of Books, Gresham tends to go right up to the borderline, then dances around the details. Rodriguez’s more explicit treatment, like many 1990 treatments of noir fiction (Tarantino, et al) may be freer but not necessarily better. Not sly enough for the genre.
Excesses aside, Spain Rodriguez’s Nightmare Alley is an intelligent piece of work that does justice to Gresham’s story. Tragically, it’s also out of print, much like the 1947 movie was for some time. Time will tell if it comes back into print.
A shorter version of this article first appeared on the author’s website in 2023.
[1] Gresham wrote a foreword to a 1950 Pellegrini & Cudahy edition of The Greater Trumps and a review article in The Saturday review for the 1951 Pellegrini & Cudahy edition of The Place of the Lion. See more details at G. Connor Salter, “William Lindsay Gresham Reviews A Charles Williams Novel,” Wormwoodiana, December 20, 2024, https://wormwoodiana.blogspot.com/2024/12/william-lindsay-gresham-reviews-charles.html.
[2] The one exception to this pattern is the Nightmare Alley audiobook read by Peter Berkrot (Tantor Media, 2021), released the same year as the del Toro movie without any reported obstacles.
[3] It is worth noting here that there is a long history of studying the way noir fiction critiques American capitalism, especially when it is written by former leftists such as Gresham. For more on this angle, see Arthur Redding’s comments on Nightmare Alley in Pulp Virilities and Post-War American Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).
[4] Christine Norvell has highlighted mikvah rebirth imagery in Till We Have Faces that communicates Orual’s transformation (“Preparing the Bride: Psyche, Orual, and the Mikvah,” The Undiscovered C.S. Lewis Conference, George Fox University, Newburg, Oregon, September 25, 2026). Ritter may therefore be read as a dark mirror of the ideas that Davidman brought as editor to Lewis’ novel.
[5] See interview in G. Connor Salter, The Other Inklings: Interviews with Scholars on C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and Inklings-Adjacent Figures (Apocryphile Press, 2026).
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