Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham

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.

Soon to be a major motion picture starring Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Willem Dafoe, and Toni Colette, and directed by Academy Award–winning director Guillermo del Toro.

Guillermo del Toro’s 2021 film, starring Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, Willem Dafoe, and Toni Colette, is based on William Lindsay Gresham’s novel.

PRAISE
While I’ve known for a long time that Nightmare Alley was an established classic of noir fiction, I was utterly unprepared for its raw, Dostoevskian power. . . . It’s more than just a steamy noir classic. As a portrait of the human condition, Nightmare Alley is a creepy, all-too-harrowing masterpiece.
—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

Mr. Gresham yanked the reviewer into the midst of his macabre and compelling novel, and kept him a breathless captive until the tour was over. It’s a truly rewarding whirl through his nightmare alley, adding up to Grade-A guignol with a touch of black magic about it. If you enjoy hundred-proof evil—and a cogent analysis of same with your nightcap—then, in the words of the Ten-in-One barker, hurry, hurry, hurry!
— James MacBride, The New York Times

The ‘nightmare’ of the title rings true, for this delirious and unstoppable novel…inverts the American dream. The plot turns the Horatio Alger myth on its head and the psychology leans on Freud, but the torment, the pervading sense that the human creature lives in a trap he or she is doomed never to escape, comes from the heart and mind of the author. Never was noir more autobiographical than here….Nightmare Alley remains a masterpiece, not only due to its driving narrative power, but because it’s underpinned by the premise that the human animal is alone, helpless in the face of destiny, stumbling in the dark, down the nightmare alley toward the inevitable wall of death at the end. Yet we can’t stop ourselves hoping, and fearing, that there might be something beyond that wall. The message of this disquieting book couldn’t be more human, yet that message is metaphysical rather than moral.
—Los Angeles Times

[C]apable of eating toasted little Cormac McCarthy novels for breakfast.
—Chicago Reader

An impressive low-life novel.
— The Observer (London)

Gresham has something of Nelson Algren’s mordant power in picturing denizens of the lower depths. He is a promising contender for heavyweight honors in the rough, tough and morbid division.
— Jack Conroy, The Chicago Defender

Gresham…wrote with vivid punch and a close understanding of the carnival world.
— Los Angeles Times

Nightmare Alley is a portrait of greed seen through the rise and fall of a carny con man.
— Publishers Weekly

Certainly one of the most valuable reissues of the year.
—Canada.com

While Gresham is usually described as a ‘popular novelist,’ the epithet fails to capture his contemporary notoriety. Gresham wrote the 1946 best-seller “Nightmare Alley” (dedicated to Davidman), a grotesque noir classic about the carnival demimonde, later made into an arresting film with Tyrone Power and Joan Blondell. One reviewer described the book as a ‘tough, relentless, colorful novel that exposes the private world of the freaks in order to comment on a sick, degrading society.’
— San Francisco Chronicle

For fans of vaudeville and magic, the book is a treasure trove of trade secrets.
— Walter Kirn, The New York Times

Nightmare Alley combines the creepy world of Tod Browning’s movie ‘Freaks’ with the relentless cynicism of a Jim Thompson novel.
— Time