Nightmare Alley

What can we expect from Nightmare Alley? 

There was a moment in American letters in which this underbelly of modern America started to be addressed – a lot of that congealed around noir writing, the pulp detectives and novels. But there are other pieces of writing, like The Day of the Locust, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Nightmare Alley, that address this intersection of the modern and the visceral in a very interesting way. The original novel, when it was written, was right at the crossroads of the modern notion of psychoanalysis, kind of jamming that with the occult powers of the tarot, and the idea of travelling carnivals and spiritualism used to defraud the gullible.
It’s a really interesting mixture of things – I don’t like things straight, I like to combine things that in theory should not go together. Like a post-civil war struggle in Spain and fairytale; or a mix of a Douglas Sirk melodrama with an amphibian god and a sexual-awakening love story.