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Title details for Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham - Available

Nightmare Alley

by William Lindsay Gresham
Peter Berkrot
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    January 5, 2021

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781705234679
      • File size: 309237 KB
      • Duration: 10:44:14

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      Gresham's little-remembered noir masterpiece deserves a whole new generation of readers, and Adam Sims's dark performance is a marvelous way to reach them. The story begins in a carnival, which provides a narrator's dream assortment of characters. Though some are unmistakably comic, Gresham's vision is anything but lighthearted. His protagonist, Stanley Carlisle, is a mind reader cum spiritualist who preys on the lonely and despairing without recognizing the blackness at his own center. Sims is alive to the tragedy of Carlisle but never seeks to soften him. He coldly follows Carlisle on his unmerciful path--right to the devastating but inevitable end. M.O. (c) AudioFile 2011, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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