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

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.

Death and the Maiden

Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno,
Genoa, Italy, 1997

I don’t know why Genoa was on our itinerary. It was the nineties, I was twenty-five, my mom had enough money to take her first trip to Europe, and she invited me to go along. I pressed for certain destinations, but Genoa wasn’t on my list. My obligatory Italian stop was Bomarzo: I needed to see the Park of Monsters, which had inspired Manuel Mujica Láinez’s novel named after the small city outside Rome. And I did get to see the park, where I walked into the gaping stone Ogre’s mouth and picked up a rock to bring back as a gift for my best friend. Venice was also a must, mostly because of Lord Byron, so I could walk where he had walked and remember the lines from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: “I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs, / A palace and a prison on each hand.” Not to mention Tadzio and the plague and the flooded Venetian alleyways.

The Staglieno cemetery was not among the stops I had obsessively planned, though I was aware that it existed. One of its spectacular graves was on the cover of the album Closer, and another on the single “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” both by Joy Division, but I never liked Joy Division. Although the graves on the covers were beautiful, I didn’t consider a pilgrimage to them necessary.

But when Genoa was added to the itinerary, Staglieno became a brooding obsession for me. Back then, I was not a cemetery connoisseur the way I am now. I had intensely toured the one in La Plata, with its pyramids and sphinxes (the place is sown with dead Freemasons), and I’d been to the Recoleta Cemetery many times, back when it was practically a ghost city of gray vaults, before the tours clogged up the lane where Eva Duarte is buried and before there were whole books written about the cemetery’s quirks, its statues, and stories of people who’d been buried alive. On those early strolls through Recoleta, I’d picked out a grave of my own: I am a poor suburbanite; I can’t be buried in that fancy cemetery by my own rights, not through family or fame. But I want my friends—if I have any left by the time I die—to scatter my ashes inside one tomb in particular: that of Mendoza Paz, founder of the Animal Protection Society. It’s a lofty pyramid with no crosses or Christian symbols of any kind. It says: “Aquí no hay nada. Solo polvo y huesos. Nada” (“Here lies nothing. Just dust and bones. Nothing”). It has a barred iron door—scattering ashes through it would be easy. That will be my grave, if my friends have the courage to fulfill my wishes.

Those outings were certainly pleasant, but my love for cemeteries began at Staglieno. And the surprise—oh, the surprise of it! The internet existed in 1997, but not like it is now: you couldn’t google images and peer into every nook and cranny of the necropolis. Staglieno was a name to be savored, a photo in a tourist brochure, some words by Mark Twain, the burial place of Constance Lloyd, Oscar Wilde’s widow, a few terribly grainy images on remote Gothic-themed websites. Our frenetic itinerary allocated only two nights to Genoa. One of those two days had to be spent at Staglieno; I decided it would be the second. I had my brand-new manual camera, which I barely knew how to use, at the ready.

The first night, after a day of walking, of churches and palaces, my mom and I ate pizza and then went back to wander around the tourist neighborhood Strade Nuove, with its more than forty palaces, the most magnificent of which is the Palazzi dei Rolli. It was in that area of Genoa that I first saw him, but sometimes, when I think back, I picture him in the Uffizi Gallery, in Florence, I don’t know why. He was definitely playing his violin outside, though, his instrument case open in front of him so listeners could drop coins onto its red lining. He wasn’t theatrical or flamboyant the way street musicians, especially violinists, so often are. I remember that he looked very serious as he played, barely raising an eyebrow, and that he smiled as he took his final bow but stayed reserved and focused, that he never got needlessly dramatic. My mother, I remember, commented that he was quite good. He played the usual: Bach, Paganini’s caprices, some Mozart concerto or other. He wore his hair short, unlike almost every other guy his age in the nineties, especially in Italy. He was tall and wore a black getup that looked like a burial suit, old and a little dirty. The white shirt under his jacket was thin, almost transparent. He left the jacket open.

My mother listened to two pieces and then wanted to head back to the hotel because she was tired. I told her I would stay a while longer. I sat down among the crowd of people that had gathered around the violinist, and I remained there until he noticed my existence and smiled at me, even taking one of his bows in my direction; I applauded every piece.

Never had I seen a boy so perfectly suited for me. Later, when I talked about Enzo back in Argentina, I always said—especially to my girlfriends who had incomprehensible opinions, like how they find ugly men attractive, or how they prefer men with no necks, virile, muscular, broad-shouldered—that Enzo was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen. At least for me, for my idea of beauty, which is shadowy and pale and pliant, black-and-blue, a little moribund but happy, more dusk than night. When he finished his performance—there were three or four of us still listening—I went over to congratulate him, adding that I didn’t speak Italian. He asked me what language I spoke. English and Spanish, I said. He told me his mother was English and his father was Italian, so we could speak in English.

An Italian Englishman, I thought; a creature out of Mary Shelley or Byron. But Enzo hadn’t spent much time in England, and he wasn’t interested in talking about his family. He told me he was hungry, so I offered to treat him, saying I had money. He agreed. He was bold and dissolute; he walked without a sound; he was two heads taller than me. I told him that I usually liked boys with long hair (the spirit of the times!) but that I’d make an exception for him. He said it was ridiculous for a violinist to have long hair, it just got in your eyes and tangled up in the strings, and he felt embarrassed for the street violinists who tossed back their sweaty hair and pretended to be Paganini.

I remember the circles under his blue eyes in the interrogation-style lighting of the pizzeria, and how the waiter winked at him. Italian women are very beautiful, but I was young and wearing a violet dress with silver straps that I’d bought from a street vendor. I only recently threw that dress away, along with a bunch of other clothes that had sentimental value. I could wear it only as a shirt these days, and it would be a pretty small shirt at that.

Enzo invited me to walk around the port. He told me he couldn’t take me to his house: he lived in an occupata, a squat, where they didn’t allow visitors—they were very strict. I told him I’d thought squatters were the opposite of strict, and he was surprised. Those people are like soldiers, he told me, very regimented, very disciplined. What about you? I asked. My days there are numbered, he replied; they tolerate me because I bring in a little money, and because I’m taking my brother’s place while he’s in a house in Turin.

He lived with several kids who played in bands and a few militant anarchists. He told me the musicians were terrible, and that if I stayed longer in Genoa, I shouldn’t even think of going to see them. “But I like punk,” I told him.

“Italians don’t know how to do punk,” he replied. “Do Argentines?”

“Some of them,” I said. After a while we got up the nerve to admit that when it came to rock and its derivations, we preferred the Anglo varieties.

I told him my mom had liked his playing, and I remember his bitter expression with perfect clarity. “I have some talent,” he told me, “but I had to leave the conservatory a long time ago.” He didn’t say why, and I understood that I shouldn’t ask. He kissed me up against a wall in the port. The air was pure sea; at least, I remember it as pure sea air, without the mixture of gas and fish and grime that ruins most docks. He was cold under his thin shirt. Cold and pale. Like a vampire, like a statue. Like the most beautiful boy in the world.

“Horrors prowl the pages of the Argentine author’s fiction, which tends to be woven from the supernatural and the barbed threads of her own country’s recent history. So perhaps it’s no surprise that cemeteries hold a special personal fascination for the writer. The surprise, rather, may be that this collection of essays about her visits to graveyards all over the world is less about death than life, and the varieties—and the emotional imperative—of somehow marking its passing.”—NPR

“Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave finds the great Argentine horror writer (Our Share of Night) mixing memoir and legend for a global survey of cemeteries.”—Chicago Tribune

“In her reflective, pitch-perfect collection of linked essays, Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave, the great Argentine writer Mariana Enriquez guides us through 21 of the world’s distinctive cemeteries. . . . each chapter’s a banger, rendered in a luminous translation by Megan McDowell. . . . Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave is an immersive testament to her genius.”—Los Angeles Times

“This addicting travelogue of extremely readable prose, translated by Megan McDowell, tangles past and present like ivy climbing a stone headstone, offering fascinating cultural and historical tidbits . . . alongside life philosophies from a woman healthily obsessed with death.”—Bustle

“Mariana Enriquez documents her years of visiting graveyards across the world with infectious enthusiasm, in her first work of non-fiction translated into English.”—Financial Times

“In the brilliantly written Somebody is Walking on Your Grave, it’s easy to share Enriquez’s sense of wonder and delight as she visits some of the world’s most unforgettable cemeteries. With a knack for finding beauty and meaning in the obscure and offbeat, the author brings these burying places—and the quirky characters within them—to vivid life. Traveling with Enriquez in this enlightening, funny, and at times poignant book is like taking an adventure with your most interesting friend. I devoured every page.”—Greg Melville, author of Over My Dead Body: Unearthing the Hidden History of America's Cemeteries

“A triumph of curiosity! Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave is one of those marvels that shows how dark, joyful, and mesmerizing the world is when the brave go looking. I’m a longtime fan of Mariana Enriquez, and this book delivers everything (and more) that I love about her writing.”—Gerardo Sámano Córdova, author of Monstrilio

“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

“I cannot think of a better guide through not exactly the realm of the beyond—but rather, the all-too-real spaces where we, the living, must confront the inevitability of ‘that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.’”—Literary Hub

“Quietly, hypnotically amusing.”—Kirkus Reviews

Mariana Enriquez is a writer based in Buenos Aires. She has published in English the novel Our Share of Night and three story collections, A Sunny Place for Shady People, Things We Lost in the Fire, and The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, which was a finalist for the International Booker Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Ray Bradbury Prize for Science Fiction, Fantasy & Speculative Fiction, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Fiction. View titles by Mariana Enriquez