Nightmare Alley

Nightmare Alley is American author William Lindsay Gresham's first and best-known work.

The novel - most admired by noir fiction fans - was published in 1946, adapted into a film in 1947 starring Tyrone Power and subsequently printed as a graphic novel by Spain Rodriquez.

During the 1940s Gresham worked as an editor for a genuine crime pulp magazine in New York, during which period he wrote this book; characters range from hustlers to Machiavellian femme fatales in a dark world of show business.

Stan Carlisle is an ambitious 'carny' who eventually becomes a spiritualist for the rich and gullible.

It appears that the world is at his feet, but not everything is as it seems -