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Lost & Found

adult book group

William Lindsay Gresham's Nightmare Alley

Please join the Lost & Found book group to discuss William Lindsay Gresham's peerless noir Nightmare Alley on 28 October 2021. Perhaps best remembered as a beautifully-made Tyrone Power film from 1947, the novel pushes boundaries that Hollywood, during that period, couldn't begin to touch. It 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 an alluring 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.

There is nothing quite like this novel in the American canon. It was chosen by the Library of America for its "American Noir: 11 Classic Crime Novels of the 30s, 40s and 50s. A remake of the film, directed by Academy Award-winner Guillermo del Toro and starring Bradley Cooper, will be released on 17 December 2021.

"Written in 1946 and just reissued, Nightmare Alley was adapted into one of the most scabrous films of the 1940s. It's a grifter story, a carny story, whose main character is Stan Carlisle, a handsome con artist/fake mind reader who slowly works his way down the food chain until there's nothing left for him except the job of circus geek. It's a novel in which no ray of light ever penetrates. The novel is a fascinating curio of undoubtedly justified self-loathing—Gresham's second wife, the poet Joy Davidman, left him for C. S. Lewis. Gresham committed suicide in 1962. 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." —The Palm Beach Post

"For contemporary audiences who have never strolled through sawdust and tinsel, the carnival chapters of Nightmare Alley offer an unnerving slice of seedy Americana." —The Baltimore Sun

"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

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

“For fans of vaudeville and magic, the book is a treasure trove of trade secrets.” —Walter Kirn

We will meet upstairs near the Adult workroom to discuss this brilliant portrait of greed; it's perfect for fans of both the Golden Age of American noir and All Hallow's Eve! If you have any questions, contact me at glowry@oneallibrary.org or leave me a voicemail at (205) 445-1147. I look forward to seeing you!

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