Claire Cronin

“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.… (mais)

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.… (mais)