Nightmare Alley (New York Review Books Classics)

Nightmare Alley (New York Review Books Classics) Review

This amazing, grim novel is the ideal noir, in film or literature. If you like the tropes, gestures and sheer style of noir, then you can't go wrong with this book, because they are there in almost every line, every element of plot, especially the long denoument which is both foreseeable and satisfying. This is a great novel of the kind and of the period. If you giggle at the dialogue of "The Big Sleep," then you'll find this book satisfying.

If you're a different sort of reader though, who loves the beauty of the dialogue of "The Big Sleep," for whom noir is as much about ideas and a point of view, then you'll find this book a masterpiece. It's easy to call the book cynical, but it's not at all - the main character is cynical, and he both exploits that cynicism and is trapped by it, and his cynicism reflects that found in American society. Noir stories improvise their own sets of morals and values and, if the stories work, those ideas makes sense in the context, and in "Nightmare Alley" they work brilliantly and with great power. The book is as grim as it gets, but the power of Gresham's writing makes it almost relentlessly gripping; his lines and dialogue are excellent, and so is his structure. The pacing is excellent, the characterizations are not just effective but creatively done - these are real people, even the minor figures - and the overall shape, the way Gresham places his chapters, is terrific. His subject and context may be pulpy, but the writing is deeply skillful and without cliché. And what is perhaps most exciting and satisfying is that Gresham goes, without fear and sensationalism, so deeply into the possibilities of human cynicism and depravity, far deeper than even Jim Thompson, and that is what noir is all about. In it's own way, this is a great American novel.

Nightmare Alley (New York Review Books Classics) Feature

• ISBN13: 9781590173480
• Condition: New
• Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Nightmare Alley (New York Review Books Classics) Overview

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.

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