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 sub-culture of the carny, and a bleak and gripping fable.