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)
Cemeteries have great stories and sometimes I steal some for my books.
Called by The New York Times a "sorceress of horror," Mariana Enreiquez has been fascinated by the haunting beauty of cemeteries since she was a teenager. She visits them frequently on her travels around the world, a goth flaneur 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 is found in a common grave, Enriquez begins to examine more deeply the complex meanings of cemeteries and where our bodies come to rest.
In this transporting 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 above-ground mausoleums, the opulent Recoleta in her hometown of Buenos Aires, and beyond. 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 startling as the fiction for which she's become so beloved and admired.
