Unshod, Cackling and Naked

“This powerful collection of 13 intimate horror shorts from Thompson (Salamander Justice) derives its scares by pushing mundane Black experiences into unsettling territory. Several pieces dive into simultaneously validating and terrifying expressions of Black female rage…Readers of any background will find that these stark terrors hit close to home.”

-Publishers Weekly

A beauty pageant veteran appeases her mother by competing for one final crown, only to find herself trapped in a hand-sewn gown that cuts into her flesh. A journalist falls deeply in love with a mysterious woman but discovers his beloved can vanish and reappear hours later in the same spot, as if no time has passed at all. A cash-strapped college student agrees to work in a shop window as a mannequin but quickly learns she’s not free to break her pose. And what happens when the family pet decides it no longer wants to have “owners?”

In the grim and often horrific thirteen tales collected here, beauty is violent, and love and hate are the same feeling, laid bare by unbridled obsession. Entering worlds both strange and quotidian, and spanning horror landscapes both speculative and real, Unshod, Cackling, and Naked asks who among us is worthy of love and who deserves to die?

Tamika is a writer, producer, and journalist. She is author of Unshod, Cackling, and Naked (Unnerving Books), which Publishers Weekly calls “powerful,” “unsettling,” and “terrifying,” as well as author of Salamander Justice (Madness Heart Press). She is co-creator of the artist collective POC United and fiction editor for the group’s award-winning anthology, Graffiti . Her work has appeared in several speculative fiction anthologies as well as in Interzone , Prairie Schooner, The New York Times , and Los Angeles Review of Books , among others. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two children. You can find her online at tamikathompson. com and on Twitter/Slasher @ tamikathompson.