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Stanton Carlisle is smart, good-looking, and ambitious. Among the outcasts, freaks, and geeks of the Ten-in-One sideshow, he learns that the public is there to be gulled, and he learns how to do it. Amoral and brilliant, he aims for the brighter lights of vaudeville before a much bigger coup faking spiritualism for the rich. But his own dark fears haunt him, and he is not the only one taking advantage of terror and desire.

Published in 1946, Nightmare Alley is a noir classic--at once a vivid insight into the subculture of the carny and a bleak and gripping fable.

William Lindsay Gresham (1909-1962) was born in Baltimore and grew up in New York City. Gresham's was a tortured mind and a tormented life, and seeking to banish his demons, he lost himself in a maze of what proved dead ends--from Marxism to psychoanalysis to Christianity to Alcoholics Anonymous to Rinzai Zen Buddhism. From these demons came his novel Nightmare Alley, one of the underground classics of American literature. He wrote one more novel, Limbo Tower, which went largely unnoticed. Three non-fiction books followed: Monster Midway, Houdini, and The Book of Strength. Nightmare Alley brought Gresham fame and fortune, but he lost it all. The second of this three wives, the poet Joy Davidman, left him in 1953 for the British author C. S. Lewis. In declining health, he killed himself in New York City on September 14, 1962.

Adam Sims, Earphones Award-winning narrator, is an actor who trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art. His recordings for radio include Wenny Has Wings, The World According to Humphrey, and The Salamander Letter, all for the BBC. Film and theater credits include Band of Brothers on HBO; Lost in Space and The Madness of George III at the West Yorkshire Playhouse; Alice in Wonderland with the Royal Shakespeare Company; A Midsummer Night's Dream at Regent's Park; and Snake in Fridge at the Royal Exchange Theatre, for which he won the award for Best Actor at the Manchester Evening News Theatre Awards.