Here are 100 books that Blue Light of the Screen fans have personally recommended if you like
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I am an author, poet, and visual artist. These interests converge in my approach to literature. I think that visual and psychological descriptions of environments and circumstances are essential to enlivening the narrative and setting its tone. Often in modern literature this is diluted in favor of straightforward accounts. I believe that a story is never told with any complete objectivity but has a psychological context that must be highlighted. In addition, vivid visual descriptions greatly assist the reader in inhabiting the world of the story as seen from the characters’ points of view.
Of all the elements of this story, I feel the love triangle between Eustacia, Wildeve, and Clym is of secondary interest to the environment in which it takes place, which is the weird and lugubrious heathlands.
Perhaps I am unfamiliar with heaths; as far as I know, we don’t have any in the U.S. Hardy describes the British heathlands like the landscape of another planet. Largely flat with shallow hills and vales, it sometimes bursts with floral color, and depending on the weather, it can be beset with raking orange sunlight or gloomy palls of mist.
The locals are fond of lighting evening bonfires, and Hardy’s descriptions of the firelight dancing on their faces are mesmerizing and compellingly suggests an unbroken cultural link with Britain’s pagan past.
One of Thomas Hardy's most powerful works, The Return of the Native centers famously on Egdon Heath, the wild, haunted Wessex moor that D. H. Lawrence called "the real stuff of tragedy." The heath's changing face mirrors the fortunes of the farmers, inn-keepers, sons, mothers, and lovers who populate the novel. The "native" is Clym Yeobright, who comes home from a cosmopolitan life in Paris. He; his cousin Thomasin; her fiancé, Damon Wildeve; and the willful Eustacia Vye are the protagonists in a tale of doomed love, passion, alienation, and melancholy as Hardy brilliantly explores that theme so familiar throughout…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I‘m primarily a poet, and it seems natural to love prose that gets the most out of every word. I also deeply admire the great works of—say, Theodore Dreiser, who seems, to me, to splash words all over the page. Don’t get me wrong. But it’s precision I love and admire most. It’s what I’ve striven for. It’s what appeals to me in the books I’ve chosen. The phrase “the style is the man” simply iterates the notion that the writer who comes closest to his (or her, of course) innermost passions, deepest held convictions, and writes with clarity in expressing them, is, in fact, the author himself.
O’Connor’s stories reveal good and evil as clearly as if viewed by a jeweler—through the loupe.
What she observed in the world around her, she expressed with clarity, and such reflections are not easily absorbed. They are deep and sometimes horrifying. Sometimes she actually made me uncomfortable by forcing me to feel slight touches of... perhaps not evil, but malicious or malevolent impulses residing in much of mankind.
Strange, too, is her ability to show irony and amusement in the great human comedy. I find her stories impossible to turn away from.
An essential collection of classic stories that established Flannery O’Connor’s reputation as an American master of fiction—now with a new introduction by New York Times bestselling author Lauren Groff In 1955, with the title story and others in this critical edition, Flannery O’Connor firmly laid claim to her place as one of the most original and provocative writers of her generation. Steeped in a Southern Gothic tradition that would become synonymous with her name, these stories show O’Connor’s unique view of life—infused with religious symbolism, haunted by apocalyptic possibility, sustained by the tragic comedy of human behavior, confronted by the…
I have spent my entire working life tied to the virtuous cycle of reading, writing, and (I hope) thinking. Since my own first novel came out over twenty years ago, I have never lost my passion for reading, as I suspect that if I did, I would also lose my passion to write, and the fascination with other people and the world that fuels it. All these books have informed, gently or severely, my new novel, High John The Conqueror, encapsulating the incongruous mix between the given and the unbelievable that I find in life, and try to employ in my own work.
This book is too ambitious to be perfect, but it is the perfect example of an author doing whatever he likes, able to rely on a massive talent to bail him out of trouble every time he disappears into another labyrinthine digression. Mailer’s audacious use of the first person to tell the story of espionage in the twentieth century, becoming a conduit for his vast range of characters, real and imagined, showed me that writing a novel where you are a leading character could take you to places that writing in the third person could not. In my seventh novel, I knew it was the right story for me to finally unleash a first-person narrative on.
With unprecedented scope and consummate skill, Norman Mailer unfolds a rich and riveting epic of an American spy. Harry Hubbard is the son and godson of CIA legends. His journey to learn the secrets of his society—and his own past—takes him through the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the “momentous catastrophe” of the Kennedy assassination. All the while, Hubbard is haunted by women who were loved by both his godfather and President Kennedy. Featuring a tapestry of unforgettable characters both real and imagined, Harlot’s Ghost is a panoramic achievement in the tradition of Tolstoy, Melville, and Balzac,…
In 1913, a 15-year-old pregnant girl was found dead of apparent suicide. Dr. James Wilson, a new graduate and the first doctor ever to start a practice in this rural town, feels guilty over her death because of his delayed intervention.
I have spent my entire working life tied to the virtuous cycle of reading, writing, and (I hope) thinking. Since my own first novel came out over twenty years ago, I have never lost my passion for reading, as I suspect that if I did, I would also lose my passion to write, and the fascination with other people and the world that fuels it. All these books have informed, gently or severely, my new novel, High John The Conqueror, encapsulating the incongruous mix between the given and the unbelievable that I find in life, and try to employ in my own work.
Peace’s gutsy novel is an epic literary treatment of The British Miners Strike of the mid-eighties and reads like one long brutal poem to that ugly time. From it I learned that you could be biased, partisan, and full-blooded in a political novel, providing your treatment of your characters and the world they inhabit is consistently honest. Following him I have tried to do justice to a neglected part of rural England in the build up to the Brexit Referendum, politics less a matter of choice, as the very air the characters breathe, informing their outlook and choices like a vast atmospheric bubble none of them are able to live outside.
A major new novel from one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists 2003. Famous for his visceral sequence of novels, The Red Riding Quartet, and acclaimed as the most gifted and original crime writer to have emerged since James Ellroy, in GB84 David Peace turns his talents to the most wrenching, socially devastating and unhappy struggle of the past half century in Britain: the 1984 miner's strike. In his signature clipped prose and through a kaleidoscopic whirl of characters and perspectives, Peace describes the boardroom and coalfield battles; the struggle for influence in government and the dwindling powers of…
I grew up religious but loving scary things—horror movies, scary comic books, Dark Shadows, andThe Twilight Zone. Even the music of Alice Cooper. While I’m no longer religious, I have a doctorate in religious studies and I still have a fascination with media that cause fear. I also write horror stories. BeyondHoly HorrorI have written two more books on religion and horror and I read every book about this odd combination as soon as I can get my hands on it. I believe you should never judge people by their tastes in media—they can be decent folk even if they like horror.
This book opened my eyes to how a scholar of religion could engage with horror films. I sat in my hotel room and started reading it the day I purchased it because I couldn’t wait until I got back home to start it.
Douglas Cowan deftly demonstrates how horror films engage in conversation with religion and he does this in non-technical language. In a culture where religion, or at least organized religion, is in decline, it still has incredible power in pop culture.
Many religious people avoid horror like they would a real monster. Sacred Terror, apart from suggesting a title for my book, shows horror and religion both benefit from the discussion. Cowan has written other good books on the subject as well.
Sacred Terror examines the religious elements lurking in horror films. It answers a simple but profound question: When there are so many other scary things around, why is religion so often used to tell a scary story? In this lucid, provocative book, Douglas Cowan argues that horror films are opportune vehicles for externalizing the fears that lie inside our religious selves: of evil; of the flesh; of sacred places; of a change in the sacred order; of the supernatural gone out of control; of death, dying badly, or not remaining dead; of fanaticism; and of the power--and the powerlessness--of religion.
What could possibly captivate the mind more than monsters? As a kid, I eagerly consumed books from authors like R.L. Stine, Stephen King, and HP Lovecraft. I watched George Romero, Wes Craven, and John Carpenter, and played games like Dungeons and Dragons, Vampire: The Masquerade, andThe Call of Cthulhu.When I discovered monster studies in my PhD years—a way to read monsters as cultural productions that tell us something about the people that create them—I was hooked. Ever since, I get to continue reading my favorite books, watching my favorite movies, and playing my favorite games. It’s just that now someone’s paying me to do it.
Part theory, part media analysis, and all awesome, Nelson’s work traces the rise of the “Protestant Gothic” tradition in the United States and the way in which this dark and gloomy literary tradition came to inform most of the media we consume today. From zombies to vampires, HP Lovecraft to Guillermo del Toro, Nelson reveals the ways that the Protestant Gothic has shaped modern literature, television, and film into a space of religious imagining that we don’t even recognize.
The Gothic, Romanticism's gritty older sibling, has flourished in myriad permutations since the eighteenth century. In Gothicka, Victoria Nelson identifies the revolutionary turn it has taken in the twenty-first. Today's Gothic has fashioned its monsters into heroes and its devils into angels. It is actively reviving supernaturalism in popular culture, not as an evil dimension divorced from ordinary human existence but as part of our daily lives.
To explain this millennial shift away from the traditionally dark Protestant post-Enlightenment Gothic, Nelson studies the complex arena of contemporary Gothic subgenres that take the form of novels, films, and graphic novels. She…
Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977, and Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977. Both began a historic journey with unique 'time capsules' on board intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record 12-inch gold-plated disk…
I grew up listening to my family’s "true" ghost stories, each creepy tale ending with a declaration that "there are no such things as ghosts." As a teenager, I devoured books of folklore, with all their tales of ghosts, witches, and long-legetty beasties: and also many books about paranormal research. As an adult, I’m a complete unbeliever but still very fond of both reading and writing ghost stories!
We all think we know "A Christmas Carol" but after the Muppet version, I find myself thinking of it as simply comical.
Until I re-read it, I forget just how chilling the ghosts who visit Scrooge are. And I love "Captain Murderer," Dickens’ account of how his nursemaid terrified him with scary tales, because it takes me back to my own childhood love of terrors.
Then there are stories like "The Signalman," which is not at all funny, darkened with the signalman’s dreadful loneliness and apprehension.
Dickens was a Master. Even his humorous ghost stories have an edge of fear.
I've always been a fan of ghost stories. As a kid, I loved horror movies and the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, and H. P. Lovecraft; later on, I discovered movies like The Innocents (based on Henry James's The Turn of the Screw) and The Haunting (adapted from Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House). As a ghost historian and editor, I've discovered dozens of brilliant tales from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; these are stories that remain relevant, entertaining, and frightening.
Fans of literary fiction may not even realize that Edith Wharton (1862-1937), author of novels like The Age of Innocence and Ethan Frome, also loved to write ghost stories, which often revolve around themes of class and gender. This collection includes such gems as the truly unnerving "The Lady Maid's Bell," the eerie yet poignant "Afterward," and "All Souls," one of the most unusual Halloween tales ever penned.
Traumatised by ghost stories in her youth, Pulitzer Prize winning author Edith Wharton (1862 -1937) channelled her fear and obsession into creating a series of spine-tingling tales filled with spirits beyond the grave and other supernatural phenomena. While claiming not to believe in ghosts, paradoxically she did confess that she was frightened of them. Wharton imbues this potent irrational and imaginative fear into her ghostly fiction to great effect.
In this unique collection of finely wrought tales Wharton demonstrates her mastery of the ghost story genre. Amongst the many supernatural treats…
My name is Alister Dray Penborn. I am a lifelong mystery lover, all the way back to my favorite childhood cartoon, Scooby-Doo, and my favorite anime, Detective Conan, or Case Closed as it was called in the US at the time of airing. It's a passion that grew over the years as I was exposed to even more great mysteries. One of the most appealing aspects is the investigation process, where a character sees the inconsistencies of crime scenes, analyzes and makes sense of events, and collects and relies on the slightest clues to act as puzzle pieces to the full picture.
I feel there's an art to incorporating the paranormal into a mystery without its presence dismissing the practical aspect of the characters’ investigation. D.J. Machale reached the perfect application of this in this book and its sequel.
While the series is directed at a younger audience, the mystery is superb without much handholding but with gripping action moments and the allure of something deeper that keeps the reader guessing until it all comes to a satisfying conclusion. Especially when paired with the sequel. Side note: tangent storylines that significantly impact each other without the characters realizing it is one of the top five forms of storytelling to me!
It begins with mysterious sounds, a fleeting face outside a window, a rogue breeze—all things that can be explained away. That is, until he comes face-to-face with a character who only exists on the pages of a sketchbook—a character Marshall himself created.
Marshall has no idea why he is being tormented by this forbidding creature, but he is quickly convinced it has something to do with his best friend, Cooper, who has gone missing. Together with Cooper’s beautiful but aloof sister, Sydney, Marshall searches for the truth about his friend while ultimately uncovering…
Deputy Jenna Hart has only been working in her sleepy hometown of Pearl Springs for seven months when city officials begin to be targeted by a killer. Twenty years ago, the construction of a dam caused people to lose their land to eminent domain. That wound has not healed with…
As long as I can remember I have found the world a terrifying yet magical place. My first memories are of reading ghost stories, the best mirrors for my emotional experiences. As a teenager supernatural tales continued to inspire me and still do. Sometimes a starkly realistic approach can prove too dull or intrusive; far better to process or confront issues by presenting them as fantastical. When I return to these books, or discover similar stories, I listen hard to what they are trying to tell me. I won’t learn overnight for, as the villain in The Doll Maker states: “the life so short, the craft so long to learn.”
“Perhaps if I ask myself questions, my memory will come back?” The story opens with a now grown-up girl returning to her childhood home, only to realise on route that she is a ghost. But why did she die so young? Her mission must be to go back in time and warn her younger self of impending danger, however when she reaches her destination she can’t remember which of four sisters she is, as they all seem annoying. And what exactly is the disaster she is trying to avert? Could it be related to the pagan rituals the sisters are conducting to Monigan, the creepy doll they keep in the garden shed? What do you think? A thoughtful timeslip tale about trying to make sense of your childhood self.
Can a ghost from the future save a life in the past? A chilling tale of dark forces and revenge...
The ghost turns up one summer day, alone in a world she once knew, among people who were once her family. She knows she is one of four sisters, but which one? She can be sure of only one thing - that there's been an accident. As she struggles to find her identity, she becomes aware of a malevolent force stirring around her. Something terrible is about to happen. One of the sisters will die - unless the ghost…
