Review by Booklist Review
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. Suicide also weaves throughout the essays. Three of Nutt's family members have died by their own hand, and she is haunted by the why, the how, and what it means about her own tendency to turn to the dark. What she discovers is that writing helps her work through her feelings, and dissecting films, books, and art showcasing death and horror (as evidenced by the many pages of "Works Referenced") is a way to understand, and possibly thwart, death, even as she sees her ties to the dead grow, not fade. "Our tasks dovetail; their being dead and my being alive, two enduring constants." Lovers of experimental essays should definitely seek this out.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Poet Nutt (Wilderness Champion) 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; an early essay entwines a family vacation with references to the movie Jaws, where "a shark is a metaphor for unexpected death" and "the ocean is balm and horror." Another focuses on the experience of buying a home--"house horror," she calls it--as Nutt discovers "how dangerous a house can be, all the stairs, corners, and outlets." She describes a website where one can find out if someone died in a house, and compares the movies Beetlejuice and Poltergeist to ask "How many ways may a house be a metaphor?" As the fragmented essays poignantly return to the deaths of three of her family members by suicide, Nutt considers what it means to be the "final girl" who survives "when a horror movie's credits roll." The book's episodic, mosaic form perfectly balances the strange appeal of getting close, "but not too close" to the author's "cabinet of all past dreads." Lovers of the personal essay will be thrilled by this innovative collection. (Mar.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A writer digs into the past "to retrieve what was lost." Nutt follows up her debut poetry collection, Wilderness Champion, with her first book of prose, a spare gathering of 18 numbered, interrelated essays (a "personal canon") comprised of memories held together by fragmentary, epigrammatic thoughts, images, and lists. Running throughout the text are references to literary works, word etymologies, and films, in particular monster or horror movies--zombie, vampire, slasher, etc.--which Nutt juxtaposes against confessional, often painful personal reflections. "Horror is a reaction, recognition, a response to a call," she writes. Sorrow and death haunt her intimate "map of the bereaved"--especially the suicides in Nutt's family: her father-in-law, uncle, and great uncle--and quiet ruminating and somber musing abound. "If we attach ourselves to art," writes the author, "maybe art can attach itself to us….I am making a lineage of what lingers." Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? lurks in the background as Nutt ponders her experiences as a participant in child beauty pageants. "Each sec-ond," she writes, "tilted toward another chance to prove I was charming and beautiful." Wondering if anyone died in the house she lived in, she thinks about visiting a website that provides such information but decides against it, "too afraid to know." The author's descriptions of relationships--childhood, family, friends, sexual--weave in and out, like walking into different rooms to experience what is there, try to understand it, feel it, question it, and then move on to another room. She worries that "despair is contagious and if I'm not careful I'll infect everyone around me." Putting together her book, piece by piece, is an act of belief, as Nutt tries "to write my own self back" from the dead. Here, "survival is attached to telling." Although obtuse and rambling at times, the strange, uncanny prose rhythms created in these essays are affecting, like lucid dreams. Offbeat, imaginative essays for fans of literary experimentation. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
