Continuing my series of reviews that fell victim to my darkest depression days, today I bring back from the dead Tamika Thompson’s Unshod, Cackling, and Naked. In time for the release of her excellent debut novel, The Curse of Hester Gardens. And on the day we publish a fascinating interview with Tamika.
Thompson brings Black female experience to the centre of supernatural and psychological horror, weaving body horror, generational trauma, and razor-sharp social commentary into stories that are impossible to shake. This Unshod, Cackling, and Naked review examines why this collection stands apart in contemporary horror fiction.
Unshod Cackling and Naked by Tamika Thompson: 13 Short Stories that Refuse to Behave
There is a particular kind of rage that women carry around for years, pressed flat under layers of politeness and performance, before it eventually finds a way out. Sometimes it leaks sideways. Sometimes it erupts. And sometimes, if you’re Tamika Thompson, it becomes thirteen short horror stories so precise and so visceral that reading them feels like having your chest cavity opened.
Unshod Cackling and Naked is a horror short story collection published by Unnerving Books in January 2023. It contains thirteen stories. That number matters, because there are no fillers, no bridge pieces, no stories that exist just to give you a breather before the next one. Thompson does not offer breathing room.
Before talking about what Thompson does so well here, it’s worth acknowledging something about the short story collection as a form, because it’s a format that tends to get underestimated. Readers come to it cautiously, aware that the experience can be uneven, aware that even in strong collections some stories click and some don’t. That uneven quality is almost accepted as the price of entry.
What Thompson does in this collection, then, is genuinely unusual: the momentum builds rather than drops. The stories gather force as you move through them, and by the time you reach “Abduction Near Knife Lake,” the final story, which follows bridesmaid Samiah and her ex-boyfriend Will as they chase down a possible abductor on the backroads of Michigan after encountering an Amber Alert about a missing Black girl, the entire emotional and thematic weight of everything that came before it lands at once. That is not easy to engineer. Most collections don’t manage it.
The collection opens with a story about pet dogs who develop an inner life and decide they no longer want to be owned. It gets violent quickly. Right away, Thompson signals her approach: she takes something familiar, something domestic and presumably safe, and tilts it just far enough that the floor drops out. This is the engine driving the whole book. A beauty pageant contestant in “Under the Crown” competes one final time at her mother’s insistence, and the physical discomfort of the pageant, the teeth whiteners that burn, the dress so tight it draws blood, becomes a sustained metaphor for the ways women absorb pain in service of other people’s expectations.
A cash-strapped college student in “Mannequin Model” takes a job standing motionless in a shop window alongside real mannequins, and what begins as a portrait of precarious labour and objectification becomes something far stranger and more disturbing when the mannequins start talking. A journalist falls in love with a woman who can vanish and reappear hours later in exactly the same spot, as if no time has passed at all.
What holds these disparate premises together is the consistency of Thompson’s thematic focus. These are, fundamentally, stories about Black women, and specifically about what happens to Black women who have spent too long being polite. They are stories about the cost of accommodation, about generational trauma passed down like furniture nobody asked for, about the gap between the face you show the world and the thing that lives underneath it.
That theme is present in “And We Screamed,” in which a young girl’s complicated relationship with animals, and her eventual path toward vegetarianism as an adult, reveals darker truths about her family and herself. It surfaces again in “I Am Goddess,” which follows directly after it in the collection and creates a tonal shift so abrupt and so deliberate that you need a moment to recalibrate. Thompson structures the collection like a playlist where the transitions are part of the meaning.
The writing itself deserves attention on its own terms. Thompson came to fiction from journalism, and you can feel it in the prose, but not in the way you might expect. She doesn’t write clipped, bare sentences. She writes with precision. Every detail earns its place, every choice of word feels considered, and yet the stories never feel overworked or airless. Reading her prose is like watching someone defuse something: steady hands, complete economy of movement, and then suddenly the room is changed. The control she brings to horror is uncommon. She doesn’t reach for easy shocks. She builds discomfort methodically, then delivers it.
Thompson had already published the novella Salamander Justice through Madness Heart Press in 2022, a Hawaii-set horror story that drew praise for its distinct voice and blend of magical realism, psychological horror, and obsession. What Unshod, Cackling, and Naked demonstrates is a writer who took everything in that novella and scaled it across multiple registers simultaneously. The range here is striking. Thompson writes body horror, supernatural horror, psychological horror, and social horror, sometimes within the same story, and the seams between modes are invisible.
The collection fits naturally alongside work like Carmen Maria Machado’s Her Body and Other Parties, which similarly places women’s bodies at the intersection of horror and socially-coded expectation, or the short fiction of Tananarive Due, who has been doing this work in Black horror for decades and whose influence Thompson has acknowledged. But Unshod, Cackling, and Naked has its own texture. Where Machado tends toward the experimental and the formally restless, Thompson works with a kind of controlled fury. Where Due often writes with an outward-facing mythic scale, Thompson keeps her horror intimate, domestic, immediate. These distinctions matter. Thompson is not derivative. She knows the tradition she is working in, and she adds something to it.
One criticism worth raising honestly: a handful of stories in the middle of the collection, while individually strong, follow closely enough in tone and structure that the cumulative effect risks slight repetition before the final stories recalibrate the energy. This is a minor issue in an otherwise tightly constructed book, but readers who are sensitive to pacing in short fiction may notice it.
The collection won the 2024 Next Generation Indie Book Award for Horror, which was 100% warranted. What’s rarer, and harder to quantify, is that this is a collection that rewards thinking about. The stories operate on you after you’ve closed the book. The image of a woman whose body is slowly overtaken by a tree; Samiah in the dark Michigan backroads, calculating risk and asking who will actually come for a missing Black child. These stay.
There is a particular kind of writer who understands that horror, at its best, is just truth with better lighting. Tamika Thompson is one of them.
Further Reading
The Ghost Is the System: Tamika Thompson on The Curse of Hester Gardens and the Horror America Built
Review, The Curse of Hester Gardens by Tamika Thompson: A New Classic of American Gothic
Cocaine Bear and Other Human-Created Monsters
Unshod, Cackling, and Naked by Tamika Thompson
*Next Generation Indie Award Winner for Horror*
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?
A collection
“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
“This collection of short stories from Thompson (Salamander Justice, 2020) is thrilling and engrossing, with classic horror tropes and experimental new tactics and scares…Thanks to these exquisite stories, readers will look forward to a future library with a shelf full of Thompson’s books.”
– Booklist
“Each story pulls you in, ties you to it for one blistering hard ride after another. They all are certain to leave their own personal mark, whether it’s the twisting of everyday common things, people, or animals, or the more reflective, unspoken sorrows and hatred of those closest to us, and of ourselves.”
– Bailey Hunter, Dark Recesses Press
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