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

(Paperback, New edition)

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Description

Blue Light of the Screen is a memoir about the author's obsession with horror and the supernatural. Blue Light of the Screen is a creative-critical memoir of the author's lifelong obsession with the horror genre. To that end, the book explores depression, visual culture, trauma, religious belief, and ideas of spectrality. It sits between autobiography and cultural criticism and also contains lists and hand-drawn illustrations of horror movie scenes. Importantly, Blue Light of the Screen is not only a book about horror, it is itself a work of horror. It aims to unsettle readers through its status as a memoir that is also a ghost story, and therefore follows the formal tendencies of the Victorian ghost story and twentieth-century "weird" tale. The book employs fragmentation and narrative omissions, inset stories, shifting viewpoints and temporalities, and ambiguous conclusions. Blue Light of the Screen embeds its criticism within a larger personal story about growing up in a devoutly Catholic family, overcoming suicidal depression, uncovering intergenerational trauma, and encountering real and imagined ghosts. As an experimental memoir, Blue Light of the Screen positions the author 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.

Reviews

"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." "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." "A book written from deep within the horror genre, Cronin's Blue Light of the Screen annuls the distinction between confession and possession." "A poetic and highly personal account of the ghosts that chase us." "A striking memoir of a demon-haunted life. 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." "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."

Author Bio

Claire Cronin is a writer and musician who currently lives in the Bay Area. She is the author of the poetry chapbook A Spirit is a Mood Without a Body and has published poetry and nonfiction in an array of journals. As a musician, Cronin has released two records on independent labels, toured nationally, and been featured in major music publications like Pitchfork, Stereogum, and Fader. Cronin has an MFA in poetry from the University of California, Irvine and a PhD in English from the University of Georgia. She continues to research horror, twentieth-century American poetry, and the occult.