Nightmare Alley

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.