This writer visited 21 graveyards — and dug up some deep truths

I bet I know what you’re thinking: Essays about cemeteries? The type of people who go for this sort of thing are emo musicians, goth girls and, well, horror writers like myself. But not you.

It would be a mistake, however, to write off Mariana Enriquez’s “Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave.” Enriquez is an Argentine writer whose books include three lauded short-story collections and one acclaimed novel (“Our Share of Night”). She has been described as a horror writer, perhaps because her stories tend to shock or unsettle the reader, but I think it’s more correct to describe her as a writer of literary fiction with horror tendencies. Like these essays, she bends toward horror and the gothic, but her stories tend to use the supernatural as an entry into more worldly horrors, such as political upheaval or violence against women and children.

Enriquez doesn’t restrict herself to only famous graveyards. She visits 21 of them: 10 in Central and South America and Cuba, eight in Europe, two in the United States and one in Australia. Some are famous, such as Highgate Cemetery in London and Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia (popularized in John Berendt’s “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”). But Enriquez also tours lesser-known sites in Rottnest Island in western Australia and Entre Rios, Argentina. In this way, the book is something of a travel guide, and not just for the macabre-minded.

Graveyards offer another way to look at history. There’s big history: political upheaval (Enriquez tells us more about what happened to the mummified corpse of Eva “Evita” Perón than you probably want to know) and family sagas (such as how English families came to settle in Basque country). Enriquez recounts the follies of wealthy people desperate not to be lost to time. But mostly, she gives us small, personal histories. She notes, for instance, that many graveyards have sections for children, their graves marked with eerily empty cribs or adorned with scattered toys. She describes her pilgrimages to the burial places of writers or poets of great personal importance but whom you’re probably unaware of. (At least, I was.) As someone who’s written historical fiction, I know that readers tend to gravitate toward those moments in history that they know — or think they do — but that is a waste of precious time. All the stuff you’ve never heard of, moments from the lives of anonymous strangers, is every bit as interesting. You just need a great storyteller like Enriquez to be your guide.

The book, translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell, naturally has many great descriptions of cemeteries and graves, but Enriquez does not overlook the highlight of many graveyards: the statues. At the Presbyter Matías Maestro Cemetery in Lima, Peru, Enriquez comes upon the statue of El Niño Ricardito, a young boy who died of yellow fever. Some believe the boy to be a saint and leave him offerings: roses, rosaries and pleas for help. “This is the miraculous child,” Enriques writes. “All cemeteries have one, either a child or a young woman. However, Ricardito is different from most other miracle children because he is, clearly, a child of the upper class. His expensive Italian sculpture, his bearing, and his privileged location in the cemetery all give him away.” Elsewhere in this sprawling historical graveyard, she finds, on the tomb of Juan Elguera, a sensual “figure of a man on a rock, completely naked and doubled over in grief, with his face hidden in a blanket and some flowers.” Who was Elguera? Seeing this incredible piece of art on his grave stirs Enriquez’s curiosity.

Enriquez is very much a part of the story. She writes in a relatable way, sharing details about her life when she made the trek to these particular sites: descriptions of cities, a decade or two ago; the friends who let her crash on their couches; the book festivals that inadvertently funded her graveyard pilgrimages. Enriquez’s reasons for these excursions are as quirky and personal as her choices of which graveyards to visit and which graves to see while she’s there. Often, she’s driven by her love of music. Particularly in her youth, it seems, she was a wild girl in a leopard-print jacket chasing her favorite bands around the world, falling too easily in love with hollow-cheeked, sensitive punk or goth boys.

That will either appeal to you or it won’t. It’s a romanticism that often goes hand-in-hand with a love of the gothic, so if you have no patience for it, take this as a warning. Aside from those folks, this is a perfect book for almost anyone. If you feel yourself getting too hung up on whether you should enjoy a book about death, just remember: Death is an inescapable part of life, as this book proves.