Overview

Bisexual Latina María Solano comes to Taos for a fresh start-but the land is alive, ancient, and hungry. María Solano flees Morrison, Colorado for the high desert of Taos, New Mexico-seeking renewal after years of artistic stagnation. Her aunt Lucía painted here before vanishing mysteriously thirty years ago. The studio is untouched, the earth pigments still scattered across the workbench, and the land itself seems to hum with possibility. At first, Taos feels like salvation. María begins creating the best work of her life-paintings made with ground ochre, red clay, and the living soil of the mesa. She falls into a passionate relationship with Lars and Sofie Nielsen, a married Danish couple from a nearby artist collective. Her days are filled with color, desire, and a creative fire she thought she'd lost forever. But something is wrong. María notices her hands turning translucent. Her skin glows faintly in the desert light. She starts losing time-hours vanishing while she paints. The trees seem to watch her. And she isn't alone: River, a young sculptor from the collective, is almost fully transparent, drifting like a ghost through the studio. When María uncovers her aunt's journals, the truth becomes undeniable. An ancient geological consciousness called La Raíz-The Root-feeds on artists. It offers inspiration, brilliance, and purpose...then consumes its chosen victims, absorbing their bodies and spirits into the vast root system beneath the desert floor. María has only days left before she disappears completely. Then she discovers the secret Lucía learned too late: one life, given willingly or not, can satisfy La Raíz and save the others. River volunteers. María drums as the land consumes him, solidifying her body-but the connection remains. La Raíz has marked her. She cannot leave Taos. She cannot escape its hunger. As more artists arrive, María becomes the dark shepherd of the desert-the one who must choose who lives, and who feeds the ancient hunger waiting beneath the roots. Ochre and Bone is a queer folk horror novel about the cost of creation, complicity and survival, and the terrifying idea that some landscapes do not want to be understood...only obeyed.

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