Blue Light of the Screen is about what it means to be afraid - about immersion, superstition, delusion, and the things that keep us up at night. A creative-critical memoir of the author's obsession with the horror genre, Blue Light of the Screen embeds its criticism of horror within a larger personal story of growing up in a devoutly Catholic family, overcoming suicidal depression, uncovering intergenerational trauma, and encountering real and imagined ghosts.As Cronin writes, she positions herself as a protagonist who is haunted by what she watches and reads, like an antiquarian in an M.R. James ghost story whose sense of reality unravels through her study of arcane texts and cursed archives. In this way, Blue Light of the Screen tells the story of the author's conversion from skepticism to faith in the supernatural.Part memoir, part ghost story, and part critical theory, Blue Light of the Screen is not just a book about horror, but a work of horror itself.

From dream research and global belief systems to such unexplained phenomena as bright lights, prescient dreams, near-death and out-of-body experiences, "Passings" delves into every aspect of the end of life. Taking a scientific and anthropological approach, Carole A. Travis-Henikoff looks at how other cultures deal with death, how diverse kinds of death are treated differently, and how belief systems set the tone for grieving.
In addition to the use of science and anthropology, Travis-Henikoff includes both her own personal experiences with the end of life as well as the stories of others who help illustrate the striking realities of passing. Beginning with the many deaths that occurred during Travis-Henikoff's childhood, "Passings" moves into an up-close-and-personal look at the tragic three-and-a-half-year period when Travis-Henikoff lost her father, husband, grandmother, mother, and daughter.
By combining the personal, the scientific, and the unexplained, "Passings" offers a comprehensive investigation into the end of life that allows readers to both examine their own individual beliefs about the subject and to gain a better understanding about how we as a species cope with death and dying.

When a workman is pushed and hissed at by something invisible on the stairs of her family’s 150-year-old townhouse, Jeanne Stanton must confront the possibility that a ghost inhabits. She proceeds in the way any former Harvard Business School case writer would: she embarks upon a rigorous search for proof of the ghost’s existence and identity, exploring the literature and lore of ghosts; the practices of mediums, psychics, and “ghost busters;� and the various attempts that have been made over the decades to verify ghostly sounds and sights through scientific methods. After visits to a psychic provide insights but not proof, Stanton enters the equally mysterious realms of physics and neurology, hoping science has answers. Notables encountered during her research efforts include Henry James, Arthur Conan Doyle, Oliver Sacks, and Sigmund Freud, the latter a colleague of her home’s original owner. Wry and witty, Stanton takes time out to laugh at her own futile attempts at ghost detection—spending a sleepless night in an allegedly haunted bedroom, creeping along the edges of rooms in search of cold spots—along the way. Determined to get to the bottom of the ghost business, Stanton wavers between skepticism and belief, searching for definitive evidence—and almost failing to find it. Almost.

In 1795 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe produced his tale of tales-The fairytale of "The Green Snake and the Beautiful Lily," an extraordinary masterwork that is unique among Goethe's works. An initiatory fable of transformation, the tale arose out of the Rosicrucian, alchemical impulses that play an important role in Faust and Goethe's other writings. Among those influenced by it was Rudolf Steiner, whose mystery dramas employ similar themes. The authors begin by placing the fairytale against the background of Goethe's life and cultural setting. They then discuss its importance in the development of Steiner's spiritual science. Finally, they describe its visual language, profound mystical insights, and relevance for us today. The book includes Carlyle's classic translation of the tale and illustrations, plus Steiner's essay on its inner meaning. The authors offer a positive look at the possibilities of the twenty-first century. They view Goethe's fairytale as fully relevant to our time, just as it was when Goethe first wrote it.

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 considers the work of Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer, graphic novelists Mike Mignola and Garth Ennis, Christian writer William P. Young (author of The Shack), and filmmaker Guillermo del Toro. She considers twentieth-century Gothic masters H. P. Lovecraft, Anne Rice, and Stephen King in light of both their immediate ancestors in the eighteenth century and the original Gothic-the late medieval period from which Horace Walpole and his successors drew their inspiration. Fictions such as the Twilight and Left Behind series do more than follow the conventions of the classic Gothic novel. They are radically reviving and reinventing the transcendental worldview that informed the West's premodern era. As Jesus becomes mortal in The Da Vinci Code and the child Ofelia becomes a goddess in Pan's Labyrinth, Nelson argues that this unprecedented mainstreaming of a spiritually driven supernaturalism is a harbinger of what a post-Christian religion in America might look like.