The Graveyard Review: Vol. 2
New issue out now 🔪
Invitation to a voyage
The wall asks: “Where are you going in such a hurry, traveler?”
It’s an ossuary, the one in my father’s hometown. The question starts off a poem, one of the many memento mori adorning the 19th-century chapel’s skull-and-femur lined walls which made a strong impression on me from the first time I visited them as a child.
Being far from alone in my preoccupation with burial grounds, it is a great joy to feature writing in this issue documenting cemeteries high and low. James Webster reviews one such eternal parking lot in Forth Worth, Matthew Spencer visits Philadelphia’s Woodlands cemetery as (maybe) immortalized in Elaine May’s Mikey and Nicky (1976), Alexandra Coburn invites us to a star-studded cemetery in the City of Angels, Kate Bugos contemplates the economics of Karl Marx’s tomb at Highgate, Madeline Monroe tours Prague’s immortal sprawl, and Alexandra Gold’s photographs of Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery feature throughout.
From the static sites to the moving images, we also feature writing on the horror films that stuck with our contributors this year. Lydia Morgan returns with a paean to the Taxi Driver of Santa slashers, Lewis Jackson’s Christmas Evil (1980), Jess Bither reviews Jack Hill’s gothic cult-classic Spider Baby (1967), Joseph Coward reflects on Fabrice Du Welz’s mid-aughts underrated gem Calvaire (2004), Fengyu Seah details the uncanny effects of Thea Hvistendahl’s Handling the Undead (2024), Kelly Pau’s steers us through the zeitgeist with words on Danny Boyle’s latest zombie flick, 28 Years Later (2025), and Greta Rainbow reports from the TIFF premiere of YouTuber-cum-director Curry Barker’s Obsession (2025). And in a category of his own, the indefatigable Kyle Sandhoff sleeplessly reports from the belly of the beast as the second assistant camera on a horror film production.
Sam Dreith, Amelia Lucas, Forrest McFarland, Lydia Morgan, Stacia Phalen and Jason Sloan—in whose living rooms I have watched the best and worst the horror genre has to offer—contribute to our Nightmare on Elm Street dossier lovingly created to accompany Comet Ping Pong’s Night(mare) of the Flick VHS screening series, programmed by camp horror connoisseur Ian Signore. So much about the zine’s first issue felt like an invective against the digital threats to our lives, both in labor and in leisure. Brain rot waits for us in the grave; Why speed up the process? Collectively creating a tangible object, folding and assembling the pages ourselves and casting our lot with our fellow acolytes of the tactile felt like our way to resist the forces that would happily see us dead in life.
There is a moment from In Farthest Seas, the Italian writer Lalla Romano’s 1987 devastating and beautiful book recounting her first years and final months with her husband Innocenzo Monti, in which she admires the sunny corner of the Demonte cemetery where her great love has been laid to rest. The grave geography has not arranged for two compartments side by side, but rather one on top of the other. “They asked me, ‘Should I put him above or below?’ I said: ‘In sleeping cars, I would go above and he below. Do it that way.’”
I move at last to Stacia. The Graveyard Review is nothing if not an excuse to work alongside my most principled, creative, brilliant friend. To my fellow traveler: gratitude, gratitude, gratitude.
— L.G.
To buy Vol. 2 of The Graveyard Review, email graveyardreviewzine@gmail.com.
Digital zine: Suggested donation $2-$5
Print zine, D.C. or NYC local pickup: $10
Print zine, U.S. domestic shipping: $18
Happy Halloween :) For walking all the way down to the end, here is a print-friendly PDF of the crossword from this issue:
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