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9781913462055

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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.

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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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.

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