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

by Claire Cronin

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.

Genres: Horror, Nonfiction, Memoir, Film, Biography, Essays, Spirituality

205 pages, Paperback

First published October 13, 2020

Reviews

[Alwynne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Writer, musician and artist Claire Cronin’s book debut's a curious mix of memoir, academic theory and notes stemming from her obsession with horror shows and movies. The structure’s fragmented, short, elliptical sections contain anything from personal musings to snippets from studies of horror as a genre to potted reviews and childhood anecdotes. Reflections on the forms of trauma most frequently associated with horror narratives are intermingled with Cronin’s recollections of her struggles with depression and anxiety, insistent memories rise up and take over, most often based in her complicated relationship with her mother and her mother’s particular brand of Catholicism. The result’s hard to pin down, at times reading it felt like a direct encounter with the material manifestation of Cronin’s ongoing attempt to work through, and out, her ambivalence about religion, her internal conflicts, her ideas about life and death. Passages verged on self-flagellation or contained echoes of the confessional, alternating with attempts to conjure a literary exorcism of Cronin’s past demons. Sometimes ideas were jammed together like pieces of a jigsaw that didn’t fit but then there were moments of clarity, lyricism, humour or unexpected insight. Very much an experiment in thinking about an individual’s relationship with a particular area of visual media, the final outcome was muddled in places, overly superficial in others particularly when Cronin brought in frameworks from writers like Thacker and Freud, but for all that it could be strangely compelling: in part, perhaps, because I found it hard to work out where Cronin was going to take me next.

[Rikki King · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book has so many things I'm a sucker for- an ambiguous and hallucinatory narrative, religious fervor, discussion of mental illness and intergenerational trauma, beautiful prose interspersed with snippets of poetry, spiraling layers of metaphor and self-reference, and a metric ton of both horror and occultism. It's memoir, it's philosophy, it's commentary, and it's straight-up horror.

[Billie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Claire cronin’s Blue Light of the Screen, is the new release in a freshly forming subgenre of memoir that heralds horror and gothic. The gothic memoir has already shown its radical prowess by platforming queer and anti-racist politics. This edition joins contemporary greats like Leila Taylor and Carmen Maria Machado in a memoir that explores intergenerational trauma, mental health issues from the unique position of a devout catholic family. To read more of my thoughts on this work, check out the full review.

[Melise · Rating 2 out of 5]

My undergraduate degree was focused on examining how culture impacts on and is reflected by the time period in which it was created. I love horror movies, television and books. So, when I read the description of this book, I was really excited to read it. I was quite disappointed and gave up on it halfway through.

The book was an examination of tropes within horror films, and how the author interpreted those same concepts within her own life experience. I found her descriptions of her personal experiences like very ill-defined streams of consciousness, and her analysis was difficult to follow. In addition, as she explains in her introduction she has included her own artwork and poetry within the document, in a way that does not provide additional insight, but instead added to the confusion for me.

In some ways this felt like a book that I was reading while suffering from a high fever; I would read something I understood, then all of a sudden a line of poetry would intrude as if I was hallucinating a voice cutting in as I was reading.

I tend to dislike abstraction in my reading choices; and have tried and disliked a number of highly acclaimed post-modern novels. This work might be more appealing to readers who enjoy less concrete, more experimental books, but it didn’t work at all for me. I did give it a second star for providing me with a good list of horror films that I want to watch.

Thanks to Repeater Books for providing an advanced reading copy via NetGalley.

[Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thus horror’s paradoxical appeal to the anxious and the melancholic: the genre makes visible — through light, shadow, noise — our barely conscious (ghost-like) fears and traps them in the mansion of the screen. (13)

A personal, beautiful book that was a genuine pleasure to read. It exists in the cross-section between horror fandom, horror theory, and a kind of personal demonology. I don't have much of anything intelligent to say in review, but I loved it.

But it isn’t often death-as-nothing that I think about. I worry about living — about getting all this wrong. My life feels like a contract that I entered before I had the language to endure it. I am not afraid of death’s hell but the hell I’ve felt right here. When I plead with the air, “do not let me fall into the pit,” I mean a space inside my spirit that seems carved out of the substance of the worst parts of the world. (175)

I received an ARC of this book from Netgalley.

[Kat · Rating 4 out of 5]

very sad and very smart, this book kept me company as i have struggled to sleep this past week. i feel like we made a deal: i let it into my heart and it gave me the language to say things i've only ever thought in images (isabelle adjani writhing in possession, neve campbell so vulnerable and defiant in scream, anya taylor joy; levitating, every horror girl covered in blood that isn't hers) before. would pair so beautifully with charlie shackleton's essay-film fear itself.

whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting, every love story a ghost story, the rest is confetti, etc.

thank you to netgalley for this arc!

[Deli c: · Rating 4 out of 5]

I felt as if I have just read my own memoir written from the perspective of someone else. As someone who grew up in a strict Catholic household and who fell in love with horror stories, movies, and more, I was able to relate to every single story and experience Claire Cronin went through. I am currently in my phase of slowly embracing the Catholic religion once again in a way that is almost reassuring after having read this.

Cronin does such a wonderful job educating us on different perspectives of the world of horror, whether it was focusing on the occult, spiritualism, or the straightforward facts in this type of cinema.

[michal k-c · Rating 3 out of 5]

a veeeeerrrrryyyy Catholic memoir//possession about specters. occasionally poetic in a kind of sublime way that the overall structure seems to undercut. ultimately a nice little book about wanting to be “a worm beneath God’s boot”.

[Connor Girvan · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 / 5 stars

[Alexander Pyles · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you'll forgive me, but this was a--haunting read.

Cronin combines film and literary criticism with memoir, to reflect on the way horror moves us and continues to draw us back in, even when we are no longer moved. I truly love how much her Catholic heritage comes through here since you rarely see that in discussions about horror and the spiritual anymore.

Written in a semi-epistolary form, it gives itself over to a brief, but scintillating experience.

[Leanna Gradolph]

DNF at ~37% this is some low vibe catholic mental illness that just isn’t jiving with me. Not a bad book but it is making me *feel* bad

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

“In horror stories, sadness is a dagger or a portal or a fog.
The sadness of the character is doubled by the sadness of the spirits. Exchange or overlap of affect: a sadness not my own becomes my own. Grief becomes a threat to oneself and one's family. 𝑶𝒏𝒄𝒆, 𝒘𝒆 𝒃𝒖𝒓𝒊𝒆𝒅 𝒘𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒘𝒆 𝒍𝒐𝒔𝒕, 𝒃𝒖𝒕 𝒊𝒕 𝒄𝒂𝒎𝒆 𝒓𝒖𝒏𝒏𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒇𝒓𝒐𝒎 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒚𝒂𝒓𝒅. A spirit is a mood without a body.”

[Ryan Laferney · Rating 5 out of 5]

“If depression has a feature that redeems it, it’s that it can sensitize a person to the sorrows of the world. The suffering self, while trapped in its own prison, feels at the same time more porous and connected to the sufferings of others — though never to their joys. Boundaries blur at axes of pain. The image of oneself as a vital, intact object is replaced by something spectral and transpersonal. In the worst time of my sadness, I remember saying to my therapist: “I feel like I don’t have any skin.” The living human is a spirit too. * Or am I simply describing the more mundane feeling that everything makes me want to cry?”
― Claire Cronin, Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God

Claire Cronin's Blue Light of the Screen is a book that is hard to categorize. On one hand it's a memoir about Claire's religious upbringing, her Catholic past that haunts her - and led her to her fascination with horror and the occult. It's also about her struggles with depression, substance abuse, and finding her way back to faith. It's a creative-critical memoir of the author's obsession with the horror genre and her pursuit of truth. It's a love letter to the real darkness within us and the darkness within the world and to the imagined "darkness" presented on the blue light of the screen. It's an insightful, moving journey through the mind of the author as she wrestles with her own personal demons and comes to terms with her fascination with horror. In Cronin, I found a kindred spirit, who articulated many things I often think about.

As I too have suffered from depression, am a devout Christian drawn to the mystical side of Christianity, and have a love affair with horror, I found Cronin's "memoir" to be revelatory. Horror as a genre is built around one truth: that the world is full of fearful things. But the best horror tells us more. It tells us how to live with being afraid. I believe Cronin has found a way to do this. To live.

[Christina Dongowski · Rating 3 out of 5]

This Is a compelling, but not always successful genre mix of memoir about the authors depression & her obsession with horror & ghost movies & TV series & her sort of recovered catholic faith by way of thinking and writing a critical essay about horror stories & movies as a way to give grief, pain, depression, despair a form & make sense of their senselessness in a modern world that God has left, and that essay. Cronin quite literally pastes the book together from wildly varying sources: not only her own writings but IMDB summaries of movies, occult texts, catholic prayers & liturgical texts, poems, and her own drawings. In some instances this feels rather more like following a sort of (post)modernist conceit, than giving voice to the presences that haunt the authors conscious- & unconsciousness. There are some passages where Cronin gestures vaguely towards some sort of feminist reading of horror & catholic spirituality, but she stays firmly inside psychoanalytical frameworks of reading & interpreting cultural phenomena, so she never really gets beyond the obvious. To me the most interesting & exciting aspect of Cronins memoir is how she uses horror as a mode to seriously describe & discuss her & her female relatives religious experience & religious questions, while simultaneously using genre to do this rather obliquely. It took me a while to realise that religion & Catholicism are not merely in the book because they’re defining elements of the genre, but for real.

[Melanie Moore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Picked up this book after reading and loving Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield and seeing that she took inspiration from this book. Did not disappoint, felt like watching a mildly spooky movie on a rainy day with a slight fever. In a good way.

[Joshua Rex · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am a great admirer of Cronin's superb music (OVER AND THROUGH from Ba Da Bing records, and most recently BIG DREAD MOON from Orindal records, among others)—darkly beautiful songs which move at roughly a heartbeat's tempo and often simultaneously contain, paradoxically, sentiments both lambent and brooding. They are full of superstition ("They say—don't open your mouth when you're breathing in"), disjointed ghosts ("the spirit of a senator . . .showed me his wig and his ivory teeth"), and the devil ("Don't talk scared—you know I've known the devil"; "Well the devil must be lonesome—in his kingdom for the dead"). BLUE LIGHT OF THE SCREEN: On Horror, Ghosts, and God is a furthering of her explorations into the realms of the supernatural, the occult, and the subject of the afterlife. Uniquely, it is a critical study/memoir which details the influences and effects of the horror genre not only on the Screen generation, but Cronin herself.

In lieu of chapters, the book is divided into tantalizing snippets with enigmatic, poetic titles (Blackly green the shadows there; The suffering ghost, her mouth locked with a nail)—no doubt shaped by the author's work in poetry, in which she holds a PhD. The analytic and scholarly segments blend seamlessly with the confessional and introspective narratives, and are accentuated by the dense, almost woven in appearance illustrations. There are shrewd, poignant, and at times humorous explorations into paranormal “reality” programming (the arrogance of charlatan ghost hunters), the tropes of modern horror films (possession; tech horror phantoms; “brutal display(s) of grief, mental illness, and family dysfunction”), and the disembodied relationship contemporary culture has with the phenomena of social media.

Some of the most powerful moments in the book come when Cronin examines the seemingly tenuous line between concrete and metaphysical assessments of the nature of reality. For this reader, these were best illustrated in the "Forebodings" and "True Ghost Story" sections, where unnerving things happen to, or are dreamt by, the author, which seem in some ways to validate the subject matter in horror films as well as many of the mystical tenets of the Catholic faith, with which Cronin seems to have a complex and tumultuous relationship. The ostensible sense of possible validation derived from these uncanny instances is dubious, however, for the intuitive proof of divine intervention either by God or Fate lacks certitude in the form of incontrovertible evidence, and perhaps only leads to a further sense of otherworldly detachment—not unlike the feelings one is left with after watching the eerie and the incorporeal on the Screen. It's an intuitive "answer", perhaps, but not a solution.

One of the most startling aspects of the book is the disturbing notion that the Screen has the ability to supplant the viewer’s sense of reality, drawing the individual into itself so completely that the normal becomes in some regards paranormal. In the resulting pseudo reality the viewer is isolated, disappearing inside one’s self and doubting the verity of the axiomatic laws of nature and reason. Citing examples from her experiments in psychometry, her struggles with depression, and her relationship with prayer, Cronin details the search for a syncretic course in which she might conciliate the notions of real and unreal. Despite this decidedly harrowing journey, she discovers that: “One learns to find meaning and identity—even the ghost of pleasure—in states that seem impossible to change.”

Another stellar work from a talented, multidisciplinary artist and vital voice.

[Ceallaigh · Rating 5 out of 5]

“If this is a memoir, it’s a memoir of a mood. If this is a story, it’s a ghost story. If this is philosophy, it’s about the spectral interchange between seeing and believing. What I’m writing here is true, though figured blackly. A mirror-image of myself seen in a nearly lightless room.”

TITLE—Blue Light of the Screen
AUTHOR—Claire Cronin
PUBLISHED—2020
PUBLISHER—Repeater Books (UK)

GENRE—unconventional memoir, dissertation on Catholic-derived spirituality and the horror genre
SETTING—contemporary united states
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—ghosts, the horror genre in film, Catholicism, memoir & memory, black & white pen drawings, death & necromancy, demons & possession, curses & the occult, psychology, childhood, trauma, inherited suffering, unconventional writing style & narrative structure

WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
BONUS ELEMENT/S—I loved the lines of poetry scattered throughout the prose in italics.
PHILOSOPHY—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ // “My academic research and my spiritual life have merged.” (see Audre Lorde’s works: Zami & Sister Outsider)
PREMISE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
EXECUTION—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“What stays with a viewer like me, once in bed with doors closed and lights off, is not the thought that a monster lurks nearby but the thought that I’m the monstrous one.”

A really unique and interesting read! At times the book reads like an academic dissertation and sometimes like frantic journaling. If I hadn’t read WHITE MAGIC, by Elissa Washuta last year I would have said this is the most unique book I’d ever read. Recommend checking them both out together if you’re a memoir buff you’ll find it really interesting. They both also cover topics around spirituality and trauma.

What I especially enjoyed about this book was that it gave me a really good understanding about why the horror genre appeals to so many people—especially women and especially women my ageish. A common thread seems to be a repressive upbringing in response to being seen as different or other than what is considered normal or healthy in one’s formative sociocultural situation. An upbringing that uses fear and shame to shape behavior (& belief). An upbringing that “teaches” via rote instruction and moral judgment as opposed to encouraging intellectual humility, curiosity, and freedom of imagination.

But it’s not just that anyone who experiences some sort of formative trauma is going to be drawn to the horror genre—oftentimes the opposite is true. And sometimes the person drawn to the horror genre feels as though they have not experienced any kind of formative trauma (whether that’s true or not). And in most cases it’s not just that the horror genre is entertaining to its fans, but for many of them it is actually a source of *comfort*—a place where they feel seen.

Final, somewhat digressing thoughts: This book had me thinking about western theological and psychological models, and their systems for understanding the human condition and the place/role of humans in Nature and their relationship to gods and/or spiritual entities. It often strikes me that there is really no room for resolution from such spiritual torment as detailed in this memoir and the inner conflicts and contradictions of self facilitated by western modes of thought. It even seems that that is because such modes are *intentionally* not meant to provide resolution (/escape/relief/even understanding).

At times… (and I could be way off the mark here 😅 but) I almost felt like the author was subconsciously making a serious effort to not address this, going as far as to deny certain corollaries in some of their interpretations of events, films, experiences, books, etc.(their discussion of the film Hereditary was particularly eyebrow raising to me)—a result, in my opinion, that is largely due to the author’s assigning of certain entities and experiences as “real” versus “unreal”—a dichotomy that is purely a western construct.

So you can see how the discussion isn’t really *complete* by the end of the book—though this is not a flaw by any means. (*Another* whole other discussion—vis a vis the Christian theological perspective—would be what Jesus’s *actual* message and God’s *actual* plan for His Believers is and why a lot of modern Christian religious thought doesn’t align with those things and causes the problems it does in the spiritual lives of many Christians—Catholic or otherwise. But yeah.) ANYway. 😅

I loved this book. It was SO engrossing and thought provoking and beautifully written. Highly recommend!

I would recommend this book to readers who are interested in the horror genre and especially those for whom the horror genre is an important vehicle through which they understand their own identity and life experience. Or those for whom their Christian (esp. Catholic) upbringing has had a big impact on their lives.

“I worry that my interests are like Faust’s: I want to know the secrets of hell. Or they are like Fox Mulder’s: I want to believe.”

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️.75

TW // suicidal ideation, death, religious (Catholic) upbringing (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)

Further Reading—
- Our Wives Under the Sea, by Julia Armfield (BOTS is actually listed in the afterword to OWUTS)
- White Magic, by Elissa Washuta (memoir)
- Content Warning: Everything, by Akwaeke Emezi (“Catholic” & Igbo imagery/spirituality)
- Zami, and Sister Outsider, by Audre Lorde (biomythography, marriage of the spiritual & the professional/political)
- Shirley Jackson (horror genre work dealing with identity & inner darkness)
- Broke the Bread, Spilled the Tea, by Mitchell Kesller (oppressive Christian upbringing & a reimagined Christian spiritually)

[J Earl · Rating 3 out of 5]

Blue Light of the Screen by Claire Cronin is a mash up of memoir, parts and pieces of poems, some drawings, and some surface film analysis. I found some parts quite interesting and some just plain pointless.

If the memoir aspect had been more of a structural device I probably would have enjoyed the book better. I found many of those sections most compelling, maybe because there was a fair amount I could relate to.

The snippets from her poetry were largely hit or miss for me. First of all, taken out of the context of their respective poems isolated lines need a new contextualizing frame. Some of them added to what was around it, some seemed like they were randomly scattered about.

The drawings were fine but, for me, didn't add anything. They weren't things I just sat and admired and they did little for the book than separate some sections. Though even that seemed random.

The discussions of the films were okay, nothing particularly new or enlightening. Their value was primarily in service to the memoir aspect. Maybe a reader unfamiliar with either the films or film theory might find them intriguing, and most of the places where she brought in a theorist's thoughts worked well with what was around it.

I know this seems like a negative review, and I don't intend it as such. I'm not a fanboy so I'm not going to go over the top in bringing in my own knowledge of the topics and pretend she made those points. But she did make some observations about horror/ghost films and some revelations about her own experiences that sparked some thinking beyond simply reading the book. There are plenty of books that don't do that, so that alone is a positive.

In the same way the book was hit or miss throughout for me, I think it will be hit or miss with readers. There is no single "type" of reader I think will just immediately love the book, though many readers of different types probably will. I will recommend this to some people I know, but not necessarily because they like a particular genre. More whether or not I think they will appreciate at least one of the hybrid parts, since for me the parts never quite came together to form a whole.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

"We carry conscious, partly conscious, and seemingly concealed beliefs to the screen with us and they put a frame around our sight. Like the poignant visual details Barthes says he sees in photographs — the punctures which return him to his mother's death — certain horror plots return me to a story that my mind's already been telling. I am pulled back down familiar tracks."

Really, really remarkable! I started reading this when it first came out and didn't get on with it. I picked it back up a couple of weeks ago and devoured the remaining 80% in about a week. Cronin's book somewhat resembles the Maggie Nelson Approach, in that it situtates itself at the intersection of autobiography and art and cultural/critical theory, except this fragmentary text uses found texts I'm much more familiar with (horror fiction and studies) to explicate a story and ideas I'm much more interested in (ie it's not about having kids).

My initial bouncing off certainly had a lot to do with my shifting interest in the genre and its "IRL" antecedents, a growing realisation that the affect I've been chasing since spooking myself with old Usborne World of Mystery books as a kid in my local library had nothing to do with the metaphorical charges of ghost stories, and everything to do with a harder-to-place interest in and fear of the occult, arcane and macabre in and off themselves. Cronin's own experiences with spirituality and religion, alongside her intelligent analysis and deep horror knowledge, places her analyses and reminiscences within both a contemporary and historical framework — not to mention Manichean morality — that I've probably been trying to avoid thr existence if since being a Teenage Atheist, but which I must now admit an ongoing fascination with (if not belief in).

[joshua j · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book so easily put into words some thoughts and realisations i’ve had over the past year as i’ve got back into reading horror and studied ghost stories. i found it by chance through ‘our wives under the sea’ and thought the title sounded interesting and right up my alley. which turned out to be an understatement actually, since all these different topics both academic and personal are ones i relate to heavily at this particular time in my life.

horror movies, television, and books; ghost stories and their themes like grief, time, trauma, hauntings and haunted houses; catholicism and religious upbringing, occultism and mysticism, skepticism and circling back to faith, demons and purgatory and hell; how everything mentioned intersects in media and becomes real in the electronic and digital age, media as a whole and obsession and marshall mcluhan (who i now know i need to read) and belief and culture; the internet and screens and dreams, nightmares, visions, epistemology and eschatology; the fear and the unknown at the heart of horror, anxiety and depression and identity and all the attached metaphors such as headlessness where i knew without a doubt my favourite horror movie was about to be discussed.

it’s a memoir and a confessional, it's creative non-fiction with poetic taglines in lieu of chapters, written in prose so smooth it might as well be verse at times. in others it feels like an academic research paper, though i say that as a compliment: claiming freud is a central part of this book sounds like an insult but in a genre both psychological and superstitious which exploded in the victorian age, he’s needed here.

the tl;dr here is i could feel this book rewiring my brain as i was reading. it’s a haunted story itself, i had to reread the ending before it gave me both chills and a sense of grace, and i know it will haunt me for years to come.

[Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Musician and artist Claire Cronin’s memoir Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God, wrestles with her love of horror (especially film), ghosts, and her family’s Catholic faith, building surprising connections that left me with a lot to consider about these subjects. An eerie, affecting work, full of intriguing ideas and lush language, Cronin writes “Ghost stories are hovering uncertainties,” and as a historian and librarian, concerned with sharing the mysteries of the past, this sticks with me. Whether through nostalgia or through regret, trauma, or privilege, memories and the past stay with us and affect the present, personally and societally.

Pointing out the contemporary surge in using ghosts as a metaphor for “psychic processes, cultural and political histories, and the nature of media that the word is nearly emptied of its meaning” while its ubiquity “is causing the ghost to slip back to its former life as fact” made me reconsider my own interest in using ghosts as a set dressing for my own fears. As she discusses these fascinating topics, her writing is punctuated by summaries of horror films, her spare, affecting illustrations drawn from movie stills, and poetic, italicized snippets of story fragments or dream memories, whispering ideas through the heart of the book, as though Cronin’s own prose is haunted.

I discuss other books exploring memory, place, and ghosts at Harris' Tome Corner.

[Chloe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Claire Cronin constructs a series of abstract essays about Catholicism, depression and her love of horror. The illustrations in the book (Cronin’s own) penned well-known horror movie stills. Many essays conclude with a one sentence blurb of a horror movie, summed up like a succinct tv guide. Also included in the book are lists such as "Scenes from horror films that don't exist," "horror movie ad taglines," and "scary things that haven't happened yet."

I connected to the philosophical ideas in Cronin’s book about horror and mental health, especially. Overall, the essays on technology & horror, media such as The Keepers and A Haunting, and the essay about headlessness and the film Hereditary were highlights of the book. As mentioned in another review, her ability to articulate the nonsensical yet all-encompassing symptoms of depression were also very powerful. The abstract writing style didn't always flow, but the ideas were all quite thought-provoking. I recommend this book is for the horror fans who also are into theory and criticism.

Read full review here https://chloesnotscared.wordpress.com...

[Leighanna]

It's so disappointing when a book that has all the right components just doesn't hit the mark. Blue Light of the Screen offers so many things I love: personal essay/memoir with a pop culture/horror frame, critical theory, a fractured narrative, self-interrogation of trauma and depression, and a Catholic upbringing. But, unfortunately, it didn't come together for me at all. More than that, the parts that make up the whole weren't very successful on their own, and the connective tissue that could have made this into a fascinating and devastating memoir was non-existent.

The Selected Bibliography includes some required reading for anyone interested in the field of horror.

DNF @50%

[Lostinmylibrary · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to Repeater for giving me an arc of this book! This book is not at all what I thought it was going to be. I appreciated all of the horror movie references and giving me new horror movies that I had never heard of that I should watch. This book didn't feel like it had much cohesion on the topics talked about. I appreciated what was talked about and appreciated the different literary articles that I feel like I should now go and read. I'm confused as to what this was supposed to be. A sort of diary and life story combined with horror films could've been interesting but again it didn't feel cohesive. Giving it three stars for trying something new and being well researched.

[Magdalena Morris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came across this on Instagram and knew I had to read it instantly: I love horror, ghost stories and I was also raised Catholic - tick, tick, tick! Though I don't follow any religion (and haven't for decades), I find possession films/books terrifying. Claire Cronin writes with raw honesty as she talks about her life through horror films she watches. It all blends very well and is so easy to read, even though she writes about mental health, especially depression and suicide. I do like a horror non-fiction and this was partially a thesis and a memoir. Very interesting and I very much recommend it.

[Chris Browning · Rating 2 out of 5]

It’s not a bad book, but it feels like Cronin decided that rather than writing a book with an actual thesis, she just was happy throwing half developed thoughts and ideas together and hoping it would work as a whole. And sadly it doesn’t really manage to do that. It feels like the rough notes for a brilliant work about memory, personal history and the draw of horror as a genre especially with regard to trauma. But if she can’t be arsed to turn those notes into a proper book I’m not sure why we should be arsed to read them

[Alicia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned some interesting facts from this book, and the author's philosophic ideas on the horror genre were enlightening. The book lacks structure but it didn't bother me. It's part thesis, part memoir, and part poetry book. The only thing I didn't like was the poem verses sprinkled throughout the book. They distracted me and I don't think they add much to the book.

[Naomi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really well written, though fragmentary and scattered. I don’t necessarily mind this but I think it could have benefited from a bit more of a through line to connect its various parts. Very “In The Dream House” which is obviously super up my alley

[Uzma Hussain · Rating 4 out of 5]

Blue Light of the Screen: On Horror, Ghosts, and God" is a thought-provoking and original work that challenges readers to rethink their relationship with technology and the supernatural. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in the philosophical and cultural implications of the digital age.

[Brandon Kayda · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is an amalgamation of so many different things I’m interested in. Mixture of memoir and critical media study. Grateful to Julia Armfield for including this in her notes for OWUTS. This is one I’ll have to come back to again