Night Rooms by Gina Nutt (Wilderness Champion) is a startling collection of 18 essays ruminating on life experiences, cultural tropes and horror films, examining questions of gender, fear and grief. Fragmented in form, but firmly interconnected, these essays refuse to look away. Nutt's prose is lyrical, provocative, intimate and intelligent.
"I used to imagine wanting someone alive would revive them, if caught right after dying." This opening line establishes one of Nutt's main subjects: the deaths of loved ones and how people do (or don't) handle them. She wants to find "a balance between mourning and moving on. How does it look to not be so enamored with the image of the final girl--the one who survives--that we forget, or disavow, our dead (selves)." That final girl of horror movies is objectified: a symbol, a survivor, part of a lineage.
Haunted houses, horror flicks with sharks in them, ghost stories and slasher films meet beauty pageants, ballet lessons, sexual explorations and home décor to question what it is about the macabre that fascinates. Although subtitled as "essays," Night Rooms feels more like it contains chapters, which make reference to one another as much as within themselves. The deaths that occupy the narrator in the book's beginning are relevant again at its close. Together, these pieces form an experience that is sensory, intellectual and emotional, illuminating difficult and even uncomfortable truths.
Part personal reflection and part cultural study, this unusual collection will haunt readers, in the best ways. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia