SOMEBODY IS WALKING ON YOUR GRAVE

Travel tales and mini histories collected in cemeteries across the Americas and Europe.

Given the gothic flavor that infuses Enriquez’s fiction, it is perhaps no surprise that the author is a “cemetery connoisseur.” In this essay collection, she pulls notes from visits to iconic graveyards across Europe, the United States, and South America, lightly lacing them with personal memoir and niche cultural interests (like the Welsh punk rock band Manic Street Preachers). This is not a simplistic account of morbid tourism. Instead, Enriquez constructs mental maps of notable interments, dedicated children’s zones, and funerary statuary with vivid scenic details that illustrate how surrounding landscapes affect the delicate beauty of gravestones and monuments. She staves off the creep of the macabre with entertaining sketches of the quirkily superstitious and grave robbers, partiers, and defacers and with little-known tidbits of idiosyncratic cemetery norms. (Who knew that most cemeteries of a certain size contain a person buried standing up?) While Enriquez visits each cemetery for the appeal of the site itself, each also has its own strange history, famous inhabitants, and unlikely ghost stories. And, it turns out, cemeteries, their origin stories of creation, exhumation, and relocation, the care of them, and the mysteries that shroud them, lend themselves to discussions of geopolitical history, religious inclinations, social delineations, and how we think about both the dead and death more generally. The author’s visits to cemeteries in Patagonia and on a remote island off the coast of Perth, Australia, create a spectral background for Indigenous-colonizer relationships and serendipitous nation-state boundaries; New Orleans’s famed mausoleums provide an entrée for explaining voodoo and noting class divides. Despite hints of deeper darkness, Enriquez’s almost protective devotion to the subject of her eerie obsession supplants juicy personal details and the rendering of moral judgments to shape an ode to material remembrance that is unusual, sometimes comical, and ultimately oddly comforting.

Quietly, hypnotically amusing.