Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys | Mariana Enriquez
An enchanting, highly personal tour of some of the most iconic cemeteries of the worldpart 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 lifes 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 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 One of Publishers Weeklys Top 10 New Releases of the Fall A Most Anticipated Book of the Fall: 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 Enriquezcalled by The New York Times a sorceress of horrorhas 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 friends mother who was disappeared during Argentinas 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 essaysexcursions through death, she calls themEnriquez travels through North and South America, Europe and Australia, visiting Pariss catacombs, Pragues Old Jewish Cemetery, New Orleanss aboveground mausoleums, Buenos Airess opulent Recoleta, and more. Enriquez investigates each cemeterys 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 Enriquezs 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, Enriquezs first work of nonfiction, translated by the award-winning Megan McDowell, is as original and memorable as the stories and novels for which shes become so beloved and admired.