Synopsis:
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.
My Edition:
E-ARC provided by Net Galley
My Thoughts:
I’d like to start out by saying that I am a MASSIVE fan of Mariana Enriquez. She is an incredibly talented writer, and Our Share of Night is easily one of my favorite books of the last bunch of years. She has a knack for long, immersive, strange stories. Somebody is Walking on Your Grave is not one of those. It’s an interesting read for sure, but you probably aren’t going to get sucked into it – at least I didn’t. It was a bit of a slog for me, if I’m being completely frank.
Although each section (which covers a different cemetery Enriquez has visited) contains both factual information about the cemetery or its inhabitants and personal asides about her time there, it just wasn’t grabbing me. I kind of found myself wishing it was one or the other. That being said, one of the most impactful stories in my opinion was the story that kind of started it all – the story of her friend’s mother. That one really hit me in the feels. Possibly because I live in America and sometimes it’s really starting to feel plausible that political “detractors” are going to start being disappeared here as well. Like, I or anyone I know could vanish only to be found years later in a common grave. I don’t really like thinking about it.
There are write ups on cemeteries all over the world though, which is kind of cool. There’s the ones you’d probably think of like the catacombs in Paris or a few of the bigger ones in New Orleans, but there are also smaller ones in rural areas of a few South American and European countries which was pretty interesting. She has definitely gotten around on her cemetery tours.
Rating:
In the end, I still think she is an incredible writer. I just think that Somebody is Walking on Your Grave isn’t the book for me. Or at least not for the me that exists right now. I’ll stick to her fiction (honestly, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more immersive fiction writer imo).
Somebody is Walking on Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys
By: Mariana Enriquez
Translated by: Megan McDowell
Hogarth
Published: September 30, 2025
ISBN: 9780593733516
Hardcover, E-book
336 Pages
