Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave

Summary

An enchanting, highly personal tour of some of the most iconic cemeteries of the world—part travelogue, part memoir, part “excursions through death,” by the author of Our Share of Night and “queen of horror” (Los Angeles Times)

“Not a travelogue so much as a grave-a-logue, Somebody is Walking on Your Grave is an exuberant, witty wander among the dead. You could not have a better friend to take you by the hand and lead you for a long traipse among tilting tombstones, dank crypts, and chilling history.”—Joe Hill

“Enriquez knows cemeteries are the repositories of life’s pain and beauty. I felt more alive as I read.”—Caitlin Doughty, New York Times bestselling author of Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

“A perfect book for almost anyone.”—The Washington Post

“An immersive testament to [Enriquez’s] genius.”—Los Angeles Times

“An eccentric and enlightening peek into how memorialization happens across the world.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Fascinating . . . Enriquez hides a celebration of life in a book about death.”—Booklist, starred review

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: TIME, ELECTRIC LIT, CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY • One of Publishers Weekly’s Top 10 New Releases of the Fall • A Most Anticipated Book of the Fall: Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Literary Hub, Ms. Magazine, Bustle, Book Riot, Publishers Lunch

Cemeteries have great stories and sometimes I steal some for my books.

Mariana Enriquez—called by The New York Times a “sorceress of horror”—has been fascinated by the haunting beauty of cemeteries since she was a teenager. She has visited them frequently, a goth flaneur taking notes on her aesthetic obsession as she walks among the headstones, “where dying seems much more interesting than being alive.”

But when the body of a friend’s mother who was disappeared during Argentina’s military dictatorship was found in a common grave, Enriquez began to examine more deeply the complex meanings of cemeteries and where our bodies come to rest.

In this rich book of essays—“excursions through death,” she calls them—Enriquez travels through North and South America, Europe and Australia, visiting Paris’s catacombs, Prague’s Old Jewish Cemetery, New Orleans’s aboveground mausoleums, Buenos Aires’s opulent Recoleta, and more. Enriquez investigates each cemetery’s history and architecture, its saints and ghosts, its caretakers and visitors, and, of course, its dead.

Weaving personal stories with reportage, interviews, myths, hauntology, and more, Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave is memoir channeled through Enriquez’s passion for cemeteries, revealing as much about her own life and unique sensibility as the graveyards and tombstones she tours. Fascinating, spooky, and unlike anything else, Enriquez’s first work of nonfiction, translated by the award-winning Megan McDowell, is as original and memorable as the stories and novels for which she’s become so beloved and admired.