"Blue Light of the Screen" by Claire Cronin is a haunting and introspective collection of poetry that delves into the complexities of modern life, relationships, and the profound impact of technology. Cronin's evocative language creates a tapestry of emotions, exploring the intersections of the digital and the personal with both vulnerability and insight.

The poems within "Blue Light of the Screen" navigate the delicate balance between connection and disconnection in our technology-driven world. Cronin's writing is both contemporary and timeless, inviting readers to reflect on the ways in which screens mediate our experiences and relationships.

With its deep exploration of the human condition in the digital age, "Blue Light of the Screen" stands as a poignant and thought-provoking collection that resonates with the nuances of contemporary existence. Cronin's poetic voice captures the essence of the digital landscape and its impact on our lives, making this collection a compelling read for those interested in the intersection of technology and the human experience.

This one missed the mark for me. I enjoyed all its separate aspects -- the memoir, the analysis of horror, the intersections of personal identity with pop culture -- but as a whole, it fell flat. I don't regret reading it, and I might recommend it to certain people, but overall it just wasn't something I enjoyed.

A wonderful little hidden gem of a short story collection. There are some unique and interesting concepts in here that I would love to see more fully fleshed out across a longer novel. This is the place to see up and coming talent.

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%

Blue Light of the Screen is a remarkable fever dream of a book that deserves every honor possible. It’s horrifically poetic and filled to the brim with philosophical insights on our relationship as humans with the dark. The capital D dark. The big dark. All of it. It reads like a possessed stream of consciousness. I will definitely be reading this beautiful piece over and over again. I’m going to give this one the highest praise I can imagine: it needs to be inserted into curriculums all over the world. I can’t say enough for this very personal, sometimes humorous, often times tragic work of artistic expression. Do yourself a favor and pick up this book as soon as you can. It’s absolutely lovely.

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.

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.

Not what I was expecting. Reads more like narrative poetry than the "Part memoir, part ghost story, and part critical theory" description from the synopsis leads one to believe. As a fan of modern poetry I would have liked this aspect had it been alluded to beforehand, but since it came as a surprise it was difficult for me to get into the flow of the book as much as I would have liked. Objectively, the abstract voice and format works well for the topic of the book. There is something off-kilter about the way the book is written that mirrors the subject matter, which is a clever move on the author's part..

2/5 - while I can see the appeal of it for a certain audience (or even for myself, had the description been accurate enough to put me in the right headspace to appreciate it more), I cannot think of too many types of readers that I would be able to recommend this to. It seems just outside of the scope of most of the audiences it might reach. It's not "scary" in a traditional enough sense for horror fans, not historical or critical enough for fans of theory, not personal enough for memoir readers, and, though poetry-leaning, too prose-y for poetry readers.

Late review - my physical proof got here faster than my NetGalley e-ARC, unfortunately! I loved this - a slow, trancelike meditation on grief, depression, and haunting, filtered through incisive, sidelong readings of horror movies from dreamy 70s classics like Let's Scare Jessica To Death to 2012's Sinister. The many poetic, imagistic interludes may test some readers' patience, but I found the overlapping, echoing images (mirrors, long hair, frozen landscapes) effective and evocative.

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)

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.

This has been the year of the gothic hybrid-cultural-criticism-memoir for me (this book along with Leila Taylor's Darkly and Peter Counter's Be Scared of Everything, both excellent) and I'm SO into it. This was a stunning read that will stay in my mind for a long time. Also it turned me on to Claire Cronin's lovely music, which is a big bonus.

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!

I had to DNF this one. I suspect it has something to do with the formatting in the ARC version that I hope is different in the finished version. Regular print mixed with italics, what I suspect are captions for pictures that aren't there, bits that may be poetry but it's hard to tell, and single lines or phrases that don't seem to go with the paragraphs above or below them. The parts of the book I could make sense of seemed interesting and well written, but the book as a whole was a formatting mess.

This book spoils multiple movies that I have no seen yet. I got spoiled for The Sixth Sense with absolutely no warning. I'm not enjoying this book enough to continued to getting spoiled. I find the formatting makes for a very fragmented reading experience that I am just not enjoying this one enough so I am invoking my DNF policy.