Blue Light of the Screen

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.