Blue Light of the Screen is a memoir about the author's obsession with horror and the supernatural.
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.
"Part memoir, part philosophical rumination, Blue Light of the
Screen is a love letter to the darkness inside and out... and to
the flickering light of the screens around which we cluster,
seeking not warmth but truth."
"An original, compelling and genuinely unclassifiable book that is
by turns insightful, moving and disturbing - as well as an
informative introduction to cinematic horror."
"Blue Light of the Screen is a different kind of book. Cronin
allows not just one voice to speak, but a legion of voices:
critical but confessional, filled with dread and then a strange
euphoria, marred by faith yet undermined by reason... This is
critical theory as demonic possession."
"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."
"A striking memoir of a demon-haunted life... Cronin elegantly
articulates the way horror (from the art house to the grindhouse)
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."
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