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

Blue Light of the Screen is a memoir about the author's obsession with horror and the supernatural.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.

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

"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"

as well as an informative introduction to cinematic horror."

"An original, compelling and genuinely unclassifiable book that is by turns insightful, moving and disturbing

Jeffrey Sconce, author of Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television and the Technical Delusion: Electronics, Power, Insanity

"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."

About the Author

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.

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