Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave

My Cemetery Journeys

By: Mariana Enriquez, Megan McDowell - translator

Narrated by: Annette Amelia Oliveira

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.

Macabre

I did finish this book, but at times it was touch and go. I did not care for the narrator. I found her to be vaguely unpleasant, sounding like a malicious gossip. The book itself is a kind of cemetery tourism with some biographical interludes.

Good facts, bad writing, bad performance

The performance didn't do this book any favors. The reader sounded overly "breathy" all the time, like she was shocked or turned on constantly. The story had good facts about the cemeteries but went off on too many random tangents.

Inetresting and bizarre

Odd book. Parts of it were interesting, while others were bizarre. The author covers cemeteries around the world and covers some interesting and intriguing points on most of them. There is usually some history tied to at least one grave. However, the book also includes the author's history of drugs, sex partners around the world and an almost erotic interest in the art and sculptures in the cemeteries. I have no desire to read another book by this author.

Marina Enriquez does it again!

I have very few authors that I subscribe to all over the Internet to make sure I know they have a new book coming out. Mariana Enriquez is one of them. Enjoy this incredible jaunt into experiences at cemeteries all over the world. As always, Mariana is so elegant and well spoken as to be able to talk about difficult topics, but also maintain humanity and dignity. Go read it you’ll love it!