Lev Lazinskiy

Buried in Greenlawn Cemetery

I found a draft of this campy book review, likely circa 2018 in an old journal. It’s probably not complete but I don’t remember reading this book. It made me laugh to read it so I am happy to share it with the world after all of these years.

I’ve never been to Greenlawn Cemetery, but I learned about a small cross-section of its corpses after reading “Wicked Columbus Ohio” by David Meyers. This collection of short stories describes the 19th and 20th Century criminal element that called the capital of Ohio home. The title is misleading. Maybe it’s because my millennial moral compass is only available as an in-app purchase via iTunes, but the whoring, drinking, and gambling didn’t feel very “wicked” to me.

Sure there was the one about using the skin of dead inmates to fashion leather goods, where we also learn that most medical schools participated in grave robbing in order to provide surgery students with something to practice with. This slightly creepy story was followed by a snoozer, where we learned that some time in the late 1800s a bunch of cows were murdered and the author decided that we needed to know the name of every police officer who was assigned to the case.

If the first story would make a decent episode of American Horror Story, the second would make a horrible season of 24.