Beyond the Flesh (Más allá de la carne)

Fifteen horror stories reveal a Mexico where witches, ghosts, and all manner of broken bodies and spirits embody violence, desire, and feminine inheritance — a poetic, shadowed universe where the monstrous becomes a mirror of the human.

Beyond the Flesh, by Jazmín García Vázquez, is a dazzling and disturbing collection of fifteen stories in which magical realism, horror, and Mexican folklore intertwine to explore the boundaries between the human and the monstrous, beauty and grotesqueness, life and death. It is a cohesive universe where the supernatural rises from the everyday, and where bodies — physical, spiritual, or symbolic — become the battlegrounds between guilt, desire, and identity.

The tone is set from the opening story, Cross and Earth, in which a mother buries her baby believing it to be dead, only to discover — too late — that she herself is the real ghost. From there, García Vázquez invites readers into a world where ghosts, witches, and nahuales coexist with the deepest forms of human pain. In Supplicants, a girl gifted with the power to heal becomes haunted by the souls of those she cured, forced to carry, quite literally, the weight of others’ suffering.

The author combines psychological horror with a lyrical and visual sensibility. In The Beauty in Her Eyes, a woman desperate to free herself from her deformity discovers that her hump has a life of its own: a sentient creature doomed to live trapped inside a jar. In After the Impact, a children’s game turns into a ghostly tragedy; and in Pinwheel, a boy faces his own grave and accepts death with the innocence only a lost child retains.

The body as prison, inheritance, or source of horror is central in The Broken Body. A night watchman is impregnated by an insectoid being that leaves him obsessed and deranged. Inside pushes the theme to the extreme: a woman keeps her unborn child alive inside her for years, feeding it with her own body, while incest and witchcraft seal a family curse.

Other stories explore female resistance and transformation as forms of liberation. In Coyotes, a young woman and her mother find in witchcraft a way to escape patriarchal abuse; There Are No Witches turns a persecuted healer into a vengeful ball of fire — a symbol of ancestral rage. Sensuality and death intertwine in Bafea, where two dead lovers reunite every November, and moral horror unfolds in Fourteen Faces, a love story between a woman and the demon who possesses her.

The collection culminates with The Thirst, a monumental tale in which a woman discovers she has inherited the vampiric condition of her female lineage. She learns that her true legacy is not only a thirst for blood but also the power to create “decoy children” from ashes, splinters, or strands of hair — to be exchanged for the human babies she devours. In the end, she chooses to raise her own child of ash, rejecting the exchange and embracing her monstrous, powerful heritage.

RELEVANT INFORMATION: Jazmín García Vázquez is a Mexican writer and a leading voice in a new generation of female authors using horror as a vehicle for social and emotional critique. Winner of the 2020 National Flash Fiction Prize, she has become one of the most promising figures in contemporary Mexican literature.

Beyond the Flesh has immense audiovisual potential for its ability to merge horror with a poetic visual language deeply rooted in Mexican folklore. Each story functions as an independent narrative yet remains connected through a shared atmosphere. Its imagery offers an aesthetic richness ideal for a cinematic anthology or series in the vein of Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, but with a distinctly Latin American and female identity. García Vázquez reimagines magical realism through the body and gendered violence, proposing a sensory and emotional horror that transcends the supernatural to address memory and resistance.

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

AVAILABLE LANGUAGES: Spanish