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Mariana Enriquez’s fiction is crowded with characters hovering between the living and the dead. Children disappearing without a trace or, worse, reappearing uncannily unchanged; the dead haunting the living; the living reaching into the realm of the dead. Lauded as the “queen of Latin American neogothic horror,” it is no surprise that Enriquez has produced a collection of essays about her obsession with and visits to cemeteries. Fitting, too, that Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave, originally published in 2013, is the first of Enriquez’s nonfiction books to be translated into English. For me, the new translation is the occasion to return once more to an old favorite. But it is a different book, and I, too, am different from the reader who first picked it up.
Enriquez is best known in the English-speaking world for her collections of short stories (Things We Lost in the Fire, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, A Sunny Place for Shady People) and for her sprawling, magisterial Our Share of Night—I spoke with her about that novel for Public Books’s partner podcast, Novel Dialogue. But her first novel, Bajar es lo peor (The Comedown Is the Worst) appeared back in 1995, when she was all of 21. Later described by Enriquez as a rewriting of Interview with the Vampire and My Own Private Idaho relocated to Buenos Aires, Bajar es lo peor is a story of drug-fueled adolescent abandon in which one character’s terrifying visions anticipate the author’s progression into horror. Although she has continued to produce fiction, Enriquez has largely worked as a journalist in the three decades since. Her book-length publications range from biography, collaboration on graphic narratives, and a meditation on fandom to, in 2025, a collection of essays about the books she loves.
Editorial Anagrama, the Barcelona-based literary giant, has in recent years begun to reissue Enriquez’s early work, including a second, expanded edition of Somebody Is Walking that is the basis for the English translation, which includes all but three of the essays and follows the same order as the second edition. In reading these three incarnations together, I am attuned to the shifts—elisions, substitutions, reorderings—made to hail new audiences. Yet what surprises me is something else: the biting reminder that the cemetery is, at its core, the locus of grief, and grief has tentacles.
On first reading Somebody Is Walking, I found it deliciously familiar. I spent my adolescence in Buenos Aires and made my own fumbling pilgrimages to that city’s cemeteries. That spirit travels with Enriquez: the opening essay of the collection recounts a youthful visit to Genoa with her mother and an encounter with a brooding violin player who strikingly resembles the male protagonists of her fiction. Although the affair ends badly, it includes a visit to the Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno. “That’s how,” Enriquez declares, “I fell in love with cemeteries.”
Somebody Is Walking is a biting reminder that the cemetery is, at its core, the locus of grief, and grief has tentacles.
Each subsequent essay unsettles the notion that this fixation is merely personal eccentricity. For Enriquez, the cemetery is a portal. These are the places where a community memorializes its dead, and which often remain long after a particular community has dissipated. The Trevelin Cemetery of the Welsh settlers in the Argentine province of Chubut and the Jewish cemeteries in Entre Ríos both trigger her reflections on the processes by which a settler nation is constructed. In the material fact of a cemetery, one witnesses extravagant displays of wealth or stark evidence of poverty, the histories of violence and social exclusion that sustain such accumulation, and the veneration of some (Julio Cortázar, Elvis Presley, Karl Marx, César Vallejo, Arthur Schopenhauer, AC/DC’s Bon Scott) alongside the otherwise unremembered.
Even cemeteries that have been demolished or destroyed are noteworthy. There is a haunting description of Villa Epecuén in the province of Buenos Aires, buried by a flood for several decades and now little more than salt-encrusted ruins. Enriquez’s favorite cemetery, the Holy Innocents’ Cemetery in Paris, was shuttered in the 18th century to make way for the expanding city. She visits instead the Paris Catacombs, the abandoned quarries to which the remains of the Holy Innocents and other cemeteries were removed. From this cemetery of cemeteries, she plucks a bone that she names François, for Rabelais, once buried in the Holy Innocents.
The triumph of the first incarnation of Somebody Is Walking lies in its concluding swerve from the pattern organizing the rest of the book. It ends with a funeral: the belated inhumation of Marta Taboada, kidnapped and murdered (“disappeared”) in 1976, during Argentina’s last military dictatorship. The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense) located a portion of Marta’s remains in 2010, and these were buried by her children in 2011. Enriquez attends as a friend of Marta’s daughter.
Confrontation with the disappeared is perhaps the inescapable terminus for a collection about cemeteries by an Argentine writer, particularly of Enriquez’s generation. In interviews and her own writing, Enriquez has made clear that her childhood experience of that dictatorship informs her interest in horror. The obsession with cemeteries, then, can be understood as a working through of trauma that is at once personal and historical. Continued focus on the disappeared, on the search for their remains or their stolen children, and on the quest to identify parties responsible have been cornerstones in grappling with the legacies of state terrorism in Argentina. Marta herself is honored alongside two dead comrades, and representatives of organizations that have spearheaded these efforts speak at the funeral.
But what makes “The Apparition of Marta Angélica” so affecting—really, what brings me to tears almost every time I read it—is Enriquez’s resolute focus on grief. This is the grief of those who knew and loved Marta, and it is the anguish of Marta’s children who, among other decorations, write the word “Mamá” in little green stones on her casket. “Attending Marta Taboada’s funeral,” Enriquez writes, “was a political act, but it was also something as simple as being there for someone, as mourning, as ritual.” Here, the monumental, the romantic, and even the tragic become achingly quotidian.
It is a shame that the second Spanish edition ends instead with an essay on Buenos Aires’s famed Recoleta cemetery, framed by Enriquez’s account of introducing friends visiting from abroad to her city. Recoleta occasions an account of the theft and eventual return of the remains of Eva Perón, who is now buried there, and of Argentina’s longer history of missing bodies, relocated remains, and recovered reputations. Thematically, this new essay highlights and expands upon the dynamics of disappearance fundamental to “The Apparition of Marta Angélica,” while also anticipating a readership less familiar with Argentina. But it dissipates the necessary attention to grief that crowned the first version.
In reading the English translation, I was expecting that same frustrating conclusion. Instead, well before the end, Somebody Is Walking delivers me back to the resolutely personal. I have spent the last year or so grieving my father, who was Mexican and loved Mexico with the ferocity of a person who fears their belonging imperfect. As the child of Spanish exiles, such cultural touchstones as Day of the Dead were for him somewhat of an abstraction. All three incarnations of the book include the essay “Black Dogs,” which recounts Enriquez’s visits to cemeteries in Guadalajara and her fascination with Mexican cultural practices around death. I have read the essay before, and marveled at the distance it tracks between Argentina, my mother’s country, and Mexico.
This time, it makes me weep, and weep fiercely, for very different reasons. My father lived a roving life, but he happened to die in Mexico City, a small distance from the hospital where he was born, shortly before Day of the Dead. A few days later, my sister and I drove with our father’s urn from Mexico City to the town where he spent the last years of his life. On the way, we passed cemeteries where people were busily preparing to remember and reunite with their dead. It was, to borrow Enriquez’s words, “unbearably joyful,” and not at all abstract. On the first anniversary of his death, I made my version of an altar in preparation for Day of the Dead: a fitting offering for my father. 
This article was commissioned by John Plotz.
