Neethu Krishnan is a Mumbai-based Pushcart- and Best of the Net-nominated writer with works curated in 50+ international publications, including The Spectacle, Prairie Fire, Southword, and more. 

Neethu’s story ‘The Yakshi’s Barter’—in which a woman unwittingly enters into a dangerous barter with a yakshi—features in THE BARE BONES BOOK OF SPECULATIVE FICTION. The anthology’s editor Tejaswinee Roychowdhury interviewed her to find out about her literary influences.

How do you perceive speculative fiction vis-à-vis the world around you?

In both life and writing, I’m drawn to the liminal in all its iterations: temporal, spatial, physical, emotional, psychical, and more. To explore these transitory, dreamlike pockets between states of being, I find speculative fiction, with its expansive scope and kaleidoscopic range, to be the perfect literary prism. All one has to do is beam a singular, nondescript notion through this diffracting tool and watch hidden aspects, possibilities, and nuances fascinatingly reveal themselves in gradients. Ontological questioning is also so much more fun and potent when parsed through the prism of speculative fiction.

Who and/or what are some of your influences while writing speculative fiction?

When I first read Laura Esquivel’s LIKE WATER FOR CHOCOLATE, I was deliciously zinged by its delightful prose, the visceral magic in the mundane, and the palpably zesty emotions, all bound in a culturally immersed narrative. Enamoured, I remember deciding that its genre, which I’d only learn later was called magical realism, called to me most, both as a reader and writer (which I was yet to be). I also adore the sensorial style of Gabriel García Márquez, the indulgent moodiness of Clarice Lispector, and the dark-tinged surrealism of Haruki Murakami, to name a few favourites.

Tell us about the creative process behind your story.

Indian folkloric entities have always fascinated me, and the yakshi, most famous in Kerala, where I hail from, had to inevitably appear in my writing. The possibilities are endless with this local vampire-witch, and my story, ‘The Yakshi’s Barter’, took off from the classic trope of a yakshi enslaved in a tree and gave her agency. To say whether it is for good or bad is for the reader to decide.