Born and raised in India, Rati Mehrotra now lives and writes in Toronto, Canada. She is the author of the science fantasy novels Markswoman (2018) and Mahimata (2019), published by Harper Voyager, and the YA fantasy novels Night of the Raven, Dawn of the Dove (2022) and Flower and Thorn (2023), published by Wednesday Books. Her short fiction has been short-listed for the Sunburst Award, nominated for the Aurora Award, and has appeared in multiple venues including The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed Magazine, Uncanny Magazine, Apex Magazine, Podcastle, Cast of Wonders, and AE: The Canadian Science Fiction Review. “Men with Tails” is her fourth appearance in Uncanny, a beautifully crafted tale of family, poetry, and monsters.
Uncanny Magazine: I love the way this story unfolds, getting darker as it goes. What was your starting point or inspiration for this story? Did you already know the ending when you started drafting?
Rati Mehrotra: My starting point was the main character. I wanted to write a person with the same long COVID symptoms I have, because I haven’t yet seen them reflected in speculative short fiction. From there, the character took a life of her own. I could see the slow crumbling of the walls she’d built around herself. That said, I did not visualize the ending until I actually wrote it—a process that took several months.
Uncanny Magazine: One focus in this story is relationships, both familial and romantic. What are some of your favorite fictional relationships (of any type, in any medium)?
Rati Mehrotra: My favorite fictional relationships are found families. One of the sweetest such examples I know of is the family formed by the characters of the Chinese television series The Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty. There is the sleuth himself—a foodie and a government official—his guard-cum-cook boyfriend, their brilliant maidservant, a rakish doctor, and the sleuth’s divorced older sister. The show is filled with scenes of them performing acts of service for each other, saving each other, cooking, and eating dinner together. I love it.
Uncanny Magazine: Do you put Easter eggs in your stories? Are there any references in “Men with Tails” that you want to call attention to?
Rati Mehrotra: I love Easter eggs! And yes, there is indeed one in this story. I would like to draw attention to the second-last diary entry, which is not, as may appear at first glance, gibberish, but a coded entry. I used a simple substitution cipher followed by some manual substitutions of my own. I thought it would be fun to leave something extra for readers to decipher, if they should wish.
Uncanny Magazine: This story is structured as a series of dated entries and also has lists, poems, and footnotes. What was your favorite part of writing in this structure? What was the most challenging thing?
Rati Mehrotra: I enjoyed every aspect of writing in this structure, particularly the footnotes and the terrible poems. My biggest challenge was preventing the footnotes from taking over the story, which they threatened to do in an earlier draft.
Uncanny Magazine: What are some of your literary influences? What’s something you read recently and loved?
Rati Mehrotra: Gene Wolfe comes to mind. I adore his work, and the way he explores themes of identity, memory, and colonialism from the perspective of narrators who are often unreliable. We are all unreliable narrators of our own lives, after all. Perhaps that is why his work resonates so strongly with me. I particularly recommend The Book of the New Sun, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, and the Soldier series.
As for recent reads, I just finished Absolution, the latest installment in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach series, and enjoyed it very much.
Uncanny Magazine: What are you working on next?
Rati Mehrotra: I am working—at a glacial pace—on two things: a short story built out of Asian drama tropes, and a cozy secondary world fantasy that I suspect is a novella. Writing has been slow and difficult for me for the past year, so fingers crossed I can finish these in the not-too-distant future.
Uncanny Magazine: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!
© 2025 Caroline M. Yoachim
