Reading Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave is like wandering through a crumbling cemetery in the middle of a thunderstorm—beautiful, eerie, and full of ghosts that never really stay buried. Enriquez doesn’t just write about cemeteries; she excavates the emotional, political, and historical weight buried beneath them. Part travelogue, part memoir, and part cultural critique, this book is a gothic pilgrimage that takes you from Argentina to Europe to Southeast Asia, each stop revealing how we treat death—and what that says about us.

What stood out most to me is how Enriquez blends the deeply personal with the broadly historical. One minute she’s describing the architecture of a forgotten graveyard, the next she’s reflecting on Argentina’s Dirty War, or the ghosts of colonialism in Southeast Asia. It’s not a cheerful read, but it is stunning—melancholic, poetic, and occasionally macabre in a way that feels deeply reverent, not sensationalist.

It’s a book best read slowly, with pauses to look things up or just sit in the heavy mood it creates. If you’re into dark travel writing, literary horror, or just want something that makes you feel both haunted and enlightened, this book is worth your time. Just don’t expect closure—Enriquez is more interested in the questions the dead leave behind than in neat endings.

I really loved the first chapter of this, and I have loved all of Enriquez’s short story collections. However, around the third chapter, I started struggling to stay engaged. While I appreciated the history, the pacing and tone felt fairly disjointed to me, and sometimes Enriquez came across as smug toward the inhabitants of the places she visited (perhaps a translation issue). I will still read everything she writes, but I do prefer her fiction.

Thanks to Random House/Hogarth and NetGalley for this ARC of Mariana Enriquez's 'Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave.'

Having read and loved the author's massive 'Our Share of Night' and someone who loves cemeteries I was really interested to read her take on some of the world's burial grounds.

Although ostensibly 'Our Share of Night' was a horror novel it contained a large amount of history and commentary on Argentina's history, especially life and society under its military junta so I wasn't surprised to discover that these chapters - each one dealing with a different graveyard in a different city' - are suffused with commentary on the history, culture, and society of the cities and countries in which they're located.

Having been to several of them I was also anxious to get her take and was delighted that these were no mere descriptions of what you'd find in an regular guide or travelogue, they're full of quirky and off the wall personal reflections.

Dating each chapter/visit added, for me, another layer of interest to the accounts since you do get a real sense of how cities/tourism have changed in the intervening years and how that impacts the experience of cemeteries and, conversely, how unchanging the cemeteries themselves tend to be.

I was disappointed not to find Brooklyn's The Green-Wood Cemetery, Woodlawn in the Bronx, or Dublin's Glasnevin Cemetery I can only hope she's saving those for the second volume. :)

This is a lovely book that you can consume in one go or parse out the chapters to enjoy as a break from anything else you might be reading or doing.

Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave by Mariana Enriquez was obtained directly from the publisher and I chose to review it. Cemeteries, to some they are frightful places, to others they are a place to be explored. This book, by an author I had never read before, is full of essays, or “excursions through death,” as the author calls them. She visits cemeteries located throughout the America's, Europe and Australia. If you are interested in Paris’s catacombs, New Orleans’s aboveground mausoleums and many more cemeteries you may or may not have heard of, give this book a read.. Enriquez investigates each cemetery’s history and architecture, its saints and ghosts, its caretakers and visitors, and, of course, its dead.

Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave is one of those books that feels like it was written just for people who love the strange, the eerie, and the beautifully unsettling. Mariana Enriquez takes you on a haunting journey through cemeteries and burial grounds, but it’s never just about the graves—it’s about the stories and histories that cling to them. Her writing is vivid and atmospheric, making you feel the crunch of gravel under your shoes and the weight of silence in the air. What I loved most is how she blends travel, history, and a touch of the supernatural into something that’s both personal and universal. Even when the subject matter is dark, there’s a strange warmth in how she writes, like she’s inviting you into a secret world. The book left me thinking about how places carry memories and how the living and the dead are never as far apart as we think. If you enjoy a mix of gothic curiosity and real-world exploration, this is a mesmerizing read that will stick with you long after you close it.

An interesting walk through various cemeteries throughout several times in the author's life. There is a lot of fascinating history given on the cemeteries and their relationship to their respective countries. Highlights a lot of lesser known time periods and places. Overall a good read.

Part travelogue, part memoir, this is an interesting peek inside Enriquez's mind and preoccupations. Would be a great gift, the kind of book you can dip in and out of easily.

I loved Enriques's Sunny Places for Shady People, a terrific dark collection, and now in this non-fiction book, I get to see where so many of her ideas came from. In Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave, Enriquez visits numerous famous and little-known cemeteries, seeking out death and its representations in an entertaining, revealing, often quirky way. Every place and tomb has a great story, and now I can't wait to dig deeper into the histories of some of the places she visits. What's really remarkable is that this isn't just an account of death or dark tourism, but travels that delve into history and politics and art history and much more, and very personal histories for the author. I know I'll be rereading this.

Really enjoyed this Bourdain-like tour into the cemeteries of the world… I would read countless more musings from Enriquez on the sexuality of angels, rockstars who died young, and forgotten genocides. The prose is tremendous as always - hat tip to Megan McDowell’s translation work, of course - and this was compelling from start to finish, relishing in all the details and eccentricities and private histories of these places and their people. Excellent stuff.

Unfortunately, this book wasn't for me. I was hoping for this to have interesting facts and histories about cemeteries but it was pretty dry and historical. There's a chance the book just didn't translate well.

Mariana Enriquez’s Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave is an exquisite piece of literary necromancy. There’s a deep reverence in how she walks through cemeteries around the world—less as a tourist and more as a medium channeling stories the earth has buried. Each grave she visits unfolds into a layered reflection: political, personal, mystical. It’s not just about death, it’s about the living who remember, who grieve, who persist.

Enriquez’s writing is gorgeously immersive. Her prose hums with gothic allure and raw emotion, laced with historical insight and folklore that feels both unsettling and sacred. She conjures landscapes where the supernatural isn’t a gimmick—it’s a language. And her obsession with burial grounds doesn’t feel morbid; it feels radical, illuminating how mourning and memory intertwine across cultures.

What makes this book truly powerful is its emotional core. Beneath the eerie beauty is Enriquez’s own mourning, her experience of loss, and the haunting legacy of Argentina’s dictatorship. The personal and political never feel separate—they merge in every step she takes across the graves of the disappeared and the forgotten.

Reading Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave feels like being invited into a secret world, where every tombstone whispers, and every silence matters. It’s a profound, magnetic celebration of remembrance, and of the strange comfort we find when we face the dark.

I don’t often read nonfiction, but I couldn’t turn down the opportunity to read this piece from an author I trust. The premise was particularly appealing to me because I, too, love to visit a cemetery and make a point of visiting them whenever I visit a new city. Some of my very favorite memories from my European travels revolve around times I spent in cemeteries there. This book did not disappoint! Mariana knows how to tell a story, and she had me captivated during every vignette. Highly recommend if you have any interest in cemeteries, or just an excellent storyteller sharing little snapshots of her life.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for allowing me to read this.

What a pleasure, as always, to be swept up in Enriquez's hypnotic, mythic, grounded voice. Here, loyal fans are given a chance to dive into the inspirations behind many myths in her stories while all readers are invited along to explore how death and burial work across cultures on tactile and mythological levels. A clear, clean voice among the dead.

As someone who loves cemeteries, I was thrilled to get the opportunity to read this . It felt like I was taking meandering walks with the author through dark places that intersect with her own memories. At times I couldn't get enough information and was taking notes to research more, and at others I found myself wandering off in my thoughts, but overall it was very engaging! I wish there'd been more photographs as I loved all those included.

A fascinating and downright mesmerizing tour, filled to the brim with the spectrum of human emotion, connection, and wisdom. This book is totally my jam, as they say, and it's a must read for lovers of cemetery walks and explorations, as well as a must read for fans of Mariana Enriquez's writing.

Mariana Enríquez has long been known for her dark, hypnotic fiction—but Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave: My Cemetery Journeys, her collection of cemetery chronicles, reveals another layer of her extraordinary talent. Best known for her gothic short stories, Enríquez turns now to non-fiction, documenting her obsession with cemeteries across the globe in prose that is richly atmospheric and deeply personal.

This is no dry travelogue. Enríquez takes us from the crooked crosses of forgotten Argentine graveyards to the haunted catacombs of Paris, the voodoo-laced tombs of New Orleans, and the vibrantly death-embracing cemeteries of Peru and Mexico. With each stop, she offers not only historical and cultural insight, but an emotional map of her own life—grief, curiosity, and a longing for connection with the dead bleeding through every page.

The chapter on Paris’s catacombs is particularly memorable, as is her reflection on Guadalajara’s graveyards and Mexico’s singular relationship with death. Her lament over never experiencing Día de Muertos firsthand is especially poignant.

This is a book for those of us who feel at home among the tombstones. Haunting, poetic, and unexpectedly tender, Enríquez invites us to walk beside her in the shadow of mortality—and to find strange beauty there.

More like somebody is f******g on your grave am I right!!! What a delightful memoir! I, too, love visiting a cemetery and thought this was such a cool book. Mariana is such a weirdo (positive.) I read Our Share of Night a couple years ago and honestly it was a slog but these essays were quick, sharp, and super interesting and have me looking forward to reading her short stories. (However I don’t think it’s cool to deadname people even if they were literal nazis idk.)

Thank you Hogarth PRH for the arc!

First of all, thank you to Hogarth, an imprint of Random House, for the free e-copy of Somebody Is Walking On Your Grave by Mariana Enriquez for review. I really enjoyed these almost journal-style entries about different cemeteries around the world that the author has visited. The detail given to the environment kept me invested and enhanced the creepy atmosphere established by the content.

Feels a bit like reading a podcast that was transcribed into a book. I was really excited by the concept, but found overall the book did not grab me.

I can be hit or miss with short stories and unfortunately this one was a miss. I have enjoyed some of the author's previous stories but this ones failed to grab my attention. I appreciate the infusion of history but I will admit that it's not necessarily my style.

I requested this one because it might be an upcoming title I would like to review on my Youtube Channel. However, after reading the first several chapters I have determined that this book does not suit my tastes. So I decided to DNF this one.