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A Stuga On the Cusp of the Orust Riviera, tucked away next to a hobbit hole in the woods.
Nightmare Alley by William Lindsay Gresham
***PLEASE DO NOT REBLOG***
bookshelves: film-only, noir, mystery-thriller, published-1946, mental-health, teh-demon-booze, under-1000-ratings, psychology, picaresque, superstitions, filthy-lucre, ghosties-ghoulies, cults-societies-brotherhoods, twats-in-real-life, sleazy, petty-crime, lifestyles-deathstyles, games-people-play, gambling, eye-scorcher, emperor-s-new-clothes, doo-lally, divination, decline-disintergration-degradation, bullies, betrayal, author-in-the-mirror, adventure, spring-2015, lit-richer
Read from February 21 to April 01, 2015
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyEkr...Description: 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. William Lindsay Gresham’s novel is a dark jewel, a classic American tale about the varieties of deception and self-deception and the dream of redemption—a dream that is only a nightmare in disguise.
Was I surprised to find out that Gresham had dabbled in the decievers' sect 'Scientology'? Nope, this storyline seems to reflect that cult most adequately. I was also not surprised to learn this author committed suicide.
