Soon to be a major motion picture from Academy Award-winning director Guillermo del Toro and starring Bradley Cooper, Cate Blanchett, Rooney Mara, and Toni Collette.Nightmare Alley begins with an extraordinary description of a carnival-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 assistant (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.