Nightmare Alley by William L Gresham

Nightmare Alley by William L Gresham

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.

William Lindsay Gresham (1909-1962) grew up in New York City and was born in Baltimore. Gresham had a terrible mind and a tormented life, and in an attempt to exorcise his demons, he became entangled in a maze of dead ends, ranging from Marxist to psychoanalysis to Christianity to Alcoholics Anonymous to Rinzai Zen Buddhism. His work Nightmare Alley, one of the underground masterpieces of American literature, was inspired by these demons. He finished another novel, Limbo Tower, but it went largely unrecognized. Monster Midway, Houdini, and The Book of Strength were the next three nonfiction books published.

Gresham gained fame and money as a result of Nightmare Alley, but he soon lost everything. The poet Joy Davidman, the second of his three wives, left him in 1953 for the British author C.