Night-Rooms-Gina-Nutt_COV.jpg

Night Rooms

Book cover of Night Rooms by Gina Nutt. A woman sits playing solitaire and smoking a cigarette.


Past Events

Reading and conversation with author Jeannie Vanasco
Buffalo Street Books (Ithaca, NY)

Reading and conversation with author Chelsea Hodson
Exile in Bookville (Chicago, IL)

Miss Manhattan Non-Fiction Reading Series

Reading and conversation with bookseller Amanda Morrell
Book Moon (Easthampton, MA)

Franklin Park Reading Series
Patricia Lockwood, Jillian Weise, Khalisa Rae, Gina Nutt

Reading and conversation with J. Robert Lennon and Charles Greene
Buffalo Street Books (Ithaca, NY)

Mission Creek Festival DUOS: a celebration of music and literature
Streamed through outer/most

Reading and conversation with author Sarah Rose Etter
Brazos Bookstore (Houston, TX)

Reading and conversation with author Melanie Finn
A Novel Idea (Philadelphia, PA)

Reading and conversation with author Alexandra Chang
Odyssey Bookstore (Ithaca, NY)

Reading and conversation with author Elissa Washuta
Harvard Book Store (Cambridge, MA)


From Two Dollar Radio
Book Club & Reader Guide
2021 Foreword INDIES Finalist
2022 IPPY Medalist for Essay, bronze
"A Best Book of 2021" —NPR

Listen to the audiobook,
narrated by Gina Nutt & produced by Two Dollar Radio
Available now on Google Play // Kobo

Night Rooms is a poetic 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, and grief. 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.

Read an excerpt on Lit Hub
Read and listen to an excerpt at The Adroit Journal
Book Notes Essay + Playlist for Largehearted Boy

“A Most Anticipated Book of 2021” —Refinery29, Thrillist, Book Riot, Lit Hub

"Night Rooms is vulnerable, cinematic, and positively transcendent. Gina Nutt uses themes and details from horror films as a way into a meditation on the deaths she's experienced in her own life, acting as a kind of literary final girl, asking, what does it mean to survive? Nutt's exploration of this question is captivating to read, as her chainsaw-sharp sentences carve a path toward the truth. I love this book."
―Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I'm Someone Else

"Whether she’s uncovering connections between her homebuyer’s course and haunted house movies, her wedding anniversary and Victorian taxidermy tableaux, or her shopping mall’s glass elevator and destiny, Gina Nutt writes prose so astonishing I want to read it in an MRI machine just to confirm that every part of my brain indeed lit up. Night Rooms is a brilliant, beautiful, boundlessly inventive book."
―Jeannie Vanasco, author of Things We Didn't Talk About When I Was a Girl

"In Night Rooms, Gina Nutt uses horror films to describe feelings and experiences that can't be expressed in words. As haunting as any good movie and as fragmented as any life, this innovative, intimate, deeply resonant book blurs together film scenes with Nutt's own vivid recollections, giving voice to all the near-universal but inexpressible horrors, large and small, of being a woman, being a survivor, being alive."
―Amy Berkowitz, author of Tender Points

"Jumping between past and present with ease, Nutt slashes to the center of issues like motherhood and depression and ultimately emerges as the quintessential final girl of her own film... Nutt has a knack for short, sharp lines that skip the brain and go straight to the heart."
—Gabino Iglesias, NPR

"Haunting and beautiful... Night Rooms becomes the aforementioned container, constructed from artistic engagement with horror films and pop culture in which Nutt attempts to make sense of what’s around her. Sometimes we can’t look straight in the face of our reality. Instead, we need something to look through, something that refracts, gives us a new angle of vision that makes it just this side of bearable."
—Brock Kingsley, The Chicago Review of Books 

"An exquisite collection of linked essays that centers the idea of escape as a presiding principle, not just in form—as these essays break from conventional expectations in provocative ways—but also in content... In Night Rooms, the ideas orbit each other in ways that illuminate something altogether more meaningful and surprising at their core."
—Richard Scott Larson, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

"A revelation... Nutt lays out her images and ideas like tarot cards or dream memories for us to find our own answers and tell our own stories. Like the best horror tales, the essays leave us with lingering feelings of disquiet and foreboding."
—Rufus Hickok, Fangoria

"With a stunningly original concept and precise execution, Gina Nutt’s debut essay collection Night Rooms is absolutely captivating... Nutt shies away from nothing in her writing, taking bold chances with both the structure and the way she lays herself bare to the reader... Inhale the essays one by one. Set it down and reflect back on your own lived experience."
―Beth Mowbray, The Nerd Daily

"Pulling on a film’s thematic thread and tying it to a time, a place, or a feeling with ease... Captivating, vulnerable, and defiantly original, Night Rooms is a simply stunning collection. With a stream-of-consciousness style at its core, its a beautiful addition to the personal essay genre, and one that will reward even more with subsequent readings."
—Jodie Sloan, AU Review

"As Nutt dances between real and imagined horror, she questions herself at every turn, like the final girl choosing which door to enter, which way to safety... Where we cannot trust an unreliable narrator because they appear unaware of their biases, Nutt’s own admissions of uncertainty make her voice sing with vulnerability, a channel toward a deeper authority."
—Ben Lewellyn-Taylor, Heavy Feather Review

"[Nutt] spins a striking tale of survival and loss in this haunting essay collection. Nutt uses familiar tropes from horror films as a window into her thinking... Lovers of the personal essay will be thrilled by this innovative collection." 
Publishers Weekly

"These essays are affecting, like lucid dreams."
Kirkus Reviews

"Poet Nutt applies her sensibilities to these fragmented, haunting essays sharing her fear of and fascination with death. She intricately ties horror films and true crime to moments in her own life; house-buying tainted by fears of who possibly died there, scenes from Poltergeist and Beetlejuice; memories of childhood beauty pageants forever tied to JonBenét Ramsey; dreams stalked by Freddy Krueger. Lovers of experimental essays should definitely seek this out."
―Kathy Sexton, Booklist

"Gina Nutt's Night Rooms 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... Together, these pieces form an experience that is sensory, intellectual and emotional, illuminating difficult and even uncomfortable truths."
—Julia Kastner, Shelf Awareness

"[Night Rooms] is a collection told in fragments and juxtapositions wherein [Gina Nutt] darts like a minnow between examinations of beauty and horror movies, from final girls to being the final girl... There is so much possibility for grief in places of danger, and what Nutt writes seems to remind us that danger exists not only in horror movies, but in places of beauty, in places where we should feel safe. Violence can mix with pleasure, can confuse feelings of desire. How thin that gap can be."
—Amie Souza Reilly, Brevity

"Each essay feels akin to a half-remembered dream, drifting with a seemingly effortless free association... The language is beautifully recursive, looping back to layer new thoughts onto earlier ideas and images, offering the reader a little spark of pleasure when an independent connection is made while reading—and not just within single pieces, but across different essays as well. The collection paints a cohesive portrait stroke by stroke, coalescing into a whole once you reach the final page. "
—Abigail Oswald, The Rupture

"In writing both revelatory and intimate, Nutt probes the most frightening aspects of life in such a way that she manages to shed light and offer understanding even about those things that lurk in the deepest and darkest of shadows."
—Kristin Iversen, Refinery29

“Most-anticipated new books from the first half of 2021."
—Kim Ukura and Alice Burton, Book Riot, For Real Podcast, Episode 74

"Horror movies and bodily autonomy collide in poet Gina Nutt's debut essay collection. More lyrical prose than straightforward analysis, Night Rooms dismantles horror tropes through personal discursions, culminating in what it means to be the 'final girl' of her family."
―Leanne Butkovic and Emma Stefansky, Thrillist, "Books We Can't Wait to Read in 2021"

"Serpentine and stunning, Gina Nutt’s Night Rooms leads us on a tour of the empty backrooms of our own personal experiences―we weave through corridors of memory and stumble into the bloody maw of classic horror tropes. The prose reality hops, making subtle and brilliant associative links―the emptiness within the spaces rings out as loudly as the gnashing content of the words themselves. This work gives the feeling of floating aimlessly in a long-abandoned Victorian flooded with viscous liquid. A disquieting dream rendering the reader a heavy limbed ghost haunting the halls of their own past."
―Jack Hawthorn, The Raven Book Store 

"This collection has a medatative quality about it, each a slight hurt, as if pressing gently on a bruise... Nutt navigates metaphor like an expert butcher―cutting and curing words until we're left with something totally new, a different animal than the original thought. A wonderful gift for anyone who has experienced loss, or an assault, any sort of violation that has guided them into their own night room."
―Aimée Keeble, Main Street Books

"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 carries a propensity toward fear—the very thing the horror genre hinges upon and which lovers of the genre seek out."
—Mandy Shunnarah, Off the Beaten Shelf

"One of my favorite reads of 2021 and perhaps the decade... The structure is poetic and ephemeral, similar in style to Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, but inhabiting a voice entirely its own... Horror as a genre delights in transgressing boundaries, and Night Rooms as a text is acutely aware of that and mimics it to perfection."
—Raelyn Torngren, @reading.reverie