Night Rooms: Essays

"In her trenchant essay collection Night Rooms, Gina Nutt blends images from horror films with personal experience, revealing how horror tropes both echo and affect real life. An essay on being a child beauty queen, “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane,” flashes between shopping malls and JonBenét Ramsey; a current of fear and desire pulses underneath. Nutt punctuates her meditations on anxiety, depression, suicide and grief with scenes from campy films like Texas Chainsaw Massacre and quotes from poets like Paul Celan. Reading Night Rooms feels like wandering the rooms of a haunted house as a final girl, trapped and forever reckoning with her survival."