Hot Off the Shelf: Night Rooms by Gina Nutt

[image description: The book cover of Night Rooms by Gina Nutt. A blonde woman in a yellow shirt, red skirt, and red necklace is smoking a cigarette while sitting on the floor playing solitaire.]
I received a free copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Sometimes I feel like a member of Two Dollar Radio’s marketing team because I’m constantly telling people how much I love their books. I’ve read half (or more) of their catalog and I have yet to meet a book of theirs I haven’t enjoyed. Their latest, Night Rooms by Gina Nutt, due for release on March 23rd, is no exception.

First, the synopsis:

“In a horror movie, an infected character may hide a bite or rash, an urge, an unwellness. She might withdraw or act out, or behave as if nothing is the matter, nothing has happened. Any course of action opposite saying how she feels suggests suffering privately is preferable to the anticipated betrayal of being cast out.”

Night Rooms is a poetic, intimate collection of personal essays that weaves together fragmented images from horror films and cultural tropes to meditate on anxiety and depression, suicide, body image, identity, grief, and survival.

Whether competing in shopping mall beauty pageants, reflecting on childhood monsters and ballet lessons, or recounting dark cultural ephemera while facing grief and authenticity in the digital age, Gina Nutt’s shifting style echoes the sub-genres that Night Rooms highlights—spirit-haunted slow burns, possession tales, slashers, and revenge films with a feminist bent.

Refracting life through the lens of horror films, Night Rooms masterfully leaps between reality and movies, past and present—because the “final girl’s” story is ultimately a survival story told another way.

Gina Nutt and I are definitely cut from the same cloth. For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a morbid-leaning person. My favorite books as a kid were in the Goosebumps series and my favorite movies were The Addams Family and Beetlejuice. After my parents took me to see The Sixth Sense in theaters (where I was the youngest kid there by far!) I was convinced I could see spirits and talk to ghosts. And while those movies didn’t freak me out, Toy Story and James and the Giant Peach scared the hell out of me. What can I say, I was a weird kid.

And things didn’t change much as I got older. I loved scary movies like Ghost Ship, The Conjuring, The Babadook, and of course, the Goosebumps movies. I went to every haunted house in the city around Halloween and later I became a tour guide at a historic cemetery. I read the obituaries like a pulp novel, always hoping they’d reveal what killed the person. I could spend hours on the internet reading up on serial killers, their unfortunate victims, cults, and the occult. It’s addictive stuff.

The essays in this collection reveal Gina Nutt as being much the same way. The difference is that she’s considered the tropes throughout the horror genre––in film, the written word, and its other cultural accouterments––much more than I ever have. Where I have turned to creepy media and fright-inducing activities as a means of escape from the doldrums of the real world, Gina’s writing feels like she inhabits that world as a matter of course; meditating on death and the ways horror movie tropes play out in real life.

These essays are manifestos on survival as told through the narratives of the final girls, inquiries into anxiety through jump scares, thoughts on the proliferation of superstition through children’s games (“light as a feather, stiff as a board”), the hauntedness of places through explorations into sites of suicides, reflections on morbid curiosity through taxidermy and museums, and more.

Night Rooms reads like a tour de force, a stream of consciousness where Gina blends her own story into fragments of horror movies. And that, I believe, is the point: to show just how horrifying and unsettling life can be. Even normal, everyday life carriers a propensity toward fear––the very thing the horror genre hinges upon and which lovers of the genre seek out.

If you love scary movies, true crime, Stephen King, and weird history, you’re going to love this book! Preorder Night Rooms… or bewaaaaare.