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Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

by: Claire Cronin

£4.00 – £6.50

Blue Light of the Screen is about what it means to be afraid — about immersion, superstition, delusion, and the things that keep us up at night. 

A creative-critical memoir of the author’s obsession with the horror genre, Blue Light of the Screen embeds its criticism of horror within a larger personal story of growing up in a devoutly Catholic family, overcoming suicidal depression, uncovering intergenerational trauma, and encountering real and imagined ghosts.

As Cronin writes, she positions herself as a protagonist who is haunted by what she watches and reads, like an antiquarian in an M.R. James ghost story whose sense of reality unravels through her study of arcane texts and cursed archives. In this way, Blue Light of the Screen tells the story of the author’s conversion from skepticism to faith in the supernatural.

Part memoir, part ghost story, and part critical theory, Blue Light of the Screen is not just a book about horror, but a work of horror itself.

by: Claire Cronin

SKU N/A Categories Cultural Studies, Film Studies, Halloween Sale, International Women's Day 2023, Literary Essays, Memoir, Occult
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Author

  • Claire Cronin

    Claire Cronin is a writer and musician currently based in California. She has published poetry and nonfiction and is the author of the chapbook A Spirit is a Mood Without a Body. As a musician, Cronin has released records on independent labels, toured nationally, and been featured in Pitchfork and The FADER.

Book info

Paperback with free eBook9781913462055
EBook9781913462062
Number of pages229
Publication date13/10/2020

Reviews

Stephen Susco, screenwriter of The Grudge, The Grudge 2, Unfriended: Dark Web

“Part memoir, part philosophical rumination, Blue Light of the Screen is a love letter to the darkness inside and out…and the flicking light of the screens around which we cluster, seeking not warmth but truth.”

Francis Young, author of A History of Exorcism in Catholic Christianity

“Blue Light of the Screen is an original, compelling and genuinely unclassifiable book that is by turns insightful, moving and disturbing — as well as an informative introduction to cinematic horror.”

Eugene Thacker, author of Infinite Resignation, In the Dust of This Planet

“A book written from deep within the horror genre, Cronin’s Blue Light of the Screen annuls the distinction between confession and possession.”

Jeffrey Sconce, author of Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television

“Ghost-chasers seem to be everywhere these days—in the cinema, on television, across the Internet. But in Blue Light of the Screen, Claire Cronin presents a poetic and highly personal account of the ghosts that chase us. Equal parts memoir, genre study, and family melodrama, Cronin’s book suggests that the ghost isn’t out there in the world to be found so much as an internal force to be confronted, a composite of memory and metaphysics that issues from the borderlands of trauma, melancholy, faith, and (media) fictions unique to every haunted individual.”

Rodney Ascher, director of Room 237, The Nightmare

“A striking memoir of a demon-haunted life. If some of those demons happen to flicker at 24 frames a second, that only makes them all the more real. Cronin elegantly articulates the way horror (from the art house to the grind house) is often the most personal genre, leaving its viewers with powerful metaphors to decode the sometimes even more terrifying world on the other side of the screen.”

Colin Dickey, author of Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

“A dreamlike, at times hallucinatory journey through memory and nightmare. Cronin’s fragmentary approach takes a litany of horror movies as grist to explore deeper questions of uncanny belief. A strange and thoroughly enjoyable read.”

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