Horror queen pulls us into a new realm

Mariana Enriquez ponders the most haunting cemeteries around the world.

- HAMILTON CAIN

NORA LEZANO

A stone's throw from my apartment, Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery is its own dreamscape: 478 acres of parkland laid out in the 19th century, with weathered plots, granite sculptures, mausoleums for the wealthy, all set amid rolling ridges and ravines fringed by elms and azaleas. Boss Tweed is buried at GreenWood, as are Jean-Michel Basquiat and Frank Morgan, who played the humbug Wizard in "The Wizard of Oz." There's an abundance of small slabs, simple epitaphs like Our Baby. Occasionally, my wife and I pause to read as we amble across to visit our late son, inurned near a Gothic Revival gate crowned by nests of monk parakeets. His marbled niche looks onto a koi pond, a patch of wisteria.

In her reflective, pitchperfect 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. Renowned as a queen of literary horrorher stories brim with ghosts, werewolves, zombie infants - here she reveals a realist side, journalistic yet intimate. She structures her book as a travelogue, skipping from continent to continent; each chapter's a banger, rendered in a luminous translation by Megan McDowell.