Nightmare Alley
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3.8 • 48 Ratings
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Now a major motion picture from Academy Award–winning director Guillermo del Toro and starring Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, and Toni Collette
Nominated for 4 Oscars, including Best Picture
Nightmare Alley begins with an extraordinary description of a carnival-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 assistant (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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Nightmare Alley is the kind of book you read twice in a row. You burn through it the first time, swept up in the noir rush of the thrilling plot. The second time, you let yourself sink into the fascinating and dark atmosphere that made William Lindsay Gresham’s 1946 thriller a cult favorite. The novel centers on Stan Carlisle, a cynical young magician working in a two-bit traveling carnival, where he learns enough tricks and cons to build a popular psychic act with his pretty assistant, Molly. When Stan transforms himself into a spiritualist preacher, things turn ugly. Love triangles, double and triple crosses, and enough booze to float a battleship turn Nightmare Alley from a hip underworld crime novel into the stuff of Shakespearean tragedy. All this, plus it’s the book that introduced the word “geek” into popular culture. You’ve never read anything like Gresham’s book, the basis for a movie by fabled director Guillermo del Toro.
