Of Untamed Nature (De indómita naturaleza)

A Mexico where the real and the supernatural intertwine sets the stage for these stories of women who challenge death, guilt, and destiny with one goal: to be free — even if freedom means disappearing, transforming, or burning.

Of Untamed Nature is a collection of stories that explore rebellion, female identity, and the thin line between the real and the supernatural.

Through different voices and settings — rural, urban, dreamlike, and unsettling — the author maps an emotional territory where women fight to free themselves from guilt, fear, and the structures that confine them.

The book opens with Vipers of Teyolote, a tale of initiation and loss set in a mining town. Three teenagers take LSD beside a mythical fountain decorated with serpents. Their collective hallucination turns real when one of them, Claudia, vanishes — swallowed by an aquatic creature. What seems like a delirium becomes trauma: guilt, solitude, and silence will haunt the two survivors forever.

In Sombra S.A., Carmen, trapped in a suffocating marriage, discovers a company offering “practical disappearances”: they orchestrate planned vanishing acts and create new identities for their clients. The promise of freedom — financed by a mysterious “Shadow Fund” made up of women who also fled — becomes an allegory of erasure and female reinvention.

Free Fall shifts the tone to explore male vulnerability in a violent environment. Manuel, a teenage boy from Acapulco exploited sexually, finds in death the only escape from a life with no way out.

The Sylph’s Skin is a gothic tale of maternal inheritance. A daughter receives her narcissistic mother’s mirror and gradually becomes her reflection — until she turns into her. The transformation, both terrifying and liberating, embodies the fusion of love, hatred, and desire that binds mother and daughter.

In The Watcher, a woman inherits a trunk full of family relics that beats like a heart. When she opens it, she discovers it holds the living memories of her lineage. As the new guardian, she understands that memory itself can be a form of resistance.

Thread adopts the disturbing voice of a digital stalker who plans to kidnap his victim, exposing obsession as an act of violent possession.

Magical realism returns in Lizard Tongue, where Luisa, fascinated by a woman who transforms into a reptile, merges with her in an animalistic rite of liberation.

In Sam, domestic horror unveils buried guilt: a ghostly dog exposes a husband’s hidden crime.

Unfinished Appointment closes the cycle of cursed loves with macabre irony: a widow tries to contact her dead husband’s spirit, unaware that he has already returned — but with another woman.

Finally, Of Untamed Nature presents a village of immortal women who long to die. The protagonist, inspired by her rebellious grandmother, decides to escape and choose her own destiny — even if that means embracing death.

With intense, atmospheric prose, Lagunas blends myth, horror, and social critique to portray a universe where women refuse to be tamed. Each story is a dark fable about freedom, desire, and the fierce will to live.

RELEVANT INFORMATION: Analí Lagunas is a Mexican writer and cultural manager whose narrative work explores the fantastic, the supernatural, the Other, and the feminine. Her writing moves between genres such as horror and magical realism. She is the recipient of the Guerrero State Youth Short Story Award (2017), First Prize in the XXXVII National Silver Literary Games (2019), and the María Luisa Ocampo State Short Story Prize (2020).

Of Untamed Nature has remarkable audiovisual potential thanks to its structure of independent yet thematically connected stories, ideal for an anthology-style adaptation — in the vein of Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities — unified by a common thread: female resistance against the supernatural and the oppressive. Each story combines elements of magical realism, psychological horror, and local myth within deeply visual settings that lend themselves to a powerful and poetic aesthetic. Its universe of women who transform, vanish, or defy death offers a wide range of tones — from thriller to fantastic drama — with a strong symbolic and emotional core.

AUDIOVISUAL POTENTIAL: TV Series, Miniseries, Film, TV Film

AVAILABLE LANGUAGES: Spanish