Nightmare Alley

Name: Nightmare Alley
Brand: Tantor Audio
Availability: InStock
Rating: 5 (1 reviews)
Author: William Lindsay Gresham
ISBN: 9781705234662

Author: William Lindsay Gresham

Narrator: Peter Berkrot

Unabridged: 10 hr 44 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 01/05/2021

Categories: Fiction, Psychological, Noir

Synopsis

One of the twentieth century's most darkly beautiful works of crime fiction—a story of carny life, spiritualism, and a con man of merciless resolve.

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.

About William Lindsay Gresham

William Lindsay Gresham was born in Baltimore on August 20, 1909. His family moved briefly to Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1916, then to New York City, where he graduated from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn in 1926. Gresham's was a tortured mind and a tormented life, and he sought to banish his demons through a maze of dead-end ways, from Marxism to psychoanalysis to Christianity to Alcoholics Anonymous to Rinzai Zen Buddhism. From these demons came his novel Nightmare Alley, one of the underground classics of American literature. He wrote one more novel, Limbo Tower, which went largely unnoticed. Three nonfiction books followed: Monster Midway, Houdini, and The Book of Strength. Nightmare Alley brought Gresham fame and fortune, but he lost it all. The second of his three wives, the poet Joy Davidman, left him in 1953 for the British author C. S. Lewis. He killed himself in New York City on September 14, 1962.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Ellie on February 12, 2022

Rounded up from around 2.5 stars ⭐️ Nightmare alley follows the rise and fall of Stan Carlisle. Starting off in a Carnival, Stan wants to better himself and he uses his imagination and cunning to do so. But can he keep himself at the top? I want to start by saying that there were many things I enjoye......more

Goodreads review by Paul on September 25, 2021

You know that old saying “if you can’t say something nice about a person don’t say anything at all” – if William Gresham really believed that he would have written NIGHTMARE ALLEY THE END There’s a lady in the audience tonight, I think her first name begins with a C and her last name with a G, and she......more

Goodreads review by James on September 28, 2022

Stan Carlisle is a mentalist in a traveling carnival. But the young man has higher aspirations and not many moral qualms. In the carnival he hooks up with Molly, an attractive young woman who becomes his partner in a vaudeville routine. Still aiming higher, Stan buys a mail-order divinity degree and......more

Goodreads review by Dave on November 30, 2021

And a film version in December 2021, just in time for the holidays, aw. A pretty miserable noir classic that out-Calvins Calvinism in its view of total depravity, at the site of a forties American carnival, published in 1946, one year after the war ended. The carnival is a by now familiar site for Am......more