Now a major motion picture from Academy Awardโwinning director Guillermo del Toro and starring Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, and Toni Collette. Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. 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. At least for now. As a portrait of the human condition, Nightmare Alley is a creepy, all-too-harrowing masterpiece.
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. 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. All of it adds up to Grade-A guignol with a touch of black magic about it. If you enjoy hundred-proof evilโand a cogent analysis of same with your nightcapโthen, in the words of the Ten-in-One barker, hurry, hurry, hurry!
Gresham wrote the 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.
It's a novel in which no ray of light ever penetrates. The novel is a fascinating curio of undoubtedly justified self-loathingโGresham's second wife, the poet Joy Davidman, left him for C. Gresham committed suicide in The new edition has a preface by Nick Tosches, who is working on a biography of Gresham. Certainly one of the most valuable reissues of the year. His knowledge was profound, his sensitivity to the vice and viciousness lying just underneath the tinseled, gaudy, surface, remarkable.
