Blue Light of the Screen

Praise

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

“An original, compelling and genuinely unclassifiable book that is by turns insightful, moving and disturbing — as well as an informative introduction to cinematic horror.” —Francis Young, author of A History of Exorcism in Catholic Christianity

“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.” - Eugene Thacker, Infinite Resignation, In the Dust of This Planet

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

“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.” - Rodney Ascher, director of Room 237 and The Nightmare

“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.” - Colin Dickey, author of Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places