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Book: “Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng” by Kylie Lee Baker
Publishing Info: MIRA, April 2025
Where Did I Get This Book: I received an eARC from NetGalley.
Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | Indiebound
Book Description: Cora Zeng is a crime scene cleaner—but the bloody messes don’t bother her, not when she’s already witnessed the most horrific thing possible: her sister being pushed in front of a train. The killer was never caught, and Cora is still haunted by his last words: “bat eater.”
These days nobody can reach Cora: not her aunt, who wants her to prepare for the Hungry Ghost Festival; not her weird colleagues; and especially not the slack-jawed shadow lurking around her door frame. After all, it can’t be real—can it? After a series of unexplained killings in Chinatown, Cora believes someone might be targeting East Asian women, and something might be targeting Cora herself.
Review: Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an eARC of this novel!
While I am still checking into the University of Minnesota’s wastewater analysis site weekly to see see what COVID is doing in my area, and still wear masks in crowded indoor places, I will say that we have come a long way in the five years since the pandemic started. We are now entering a point in media where the pandemic is serving as a backdrop, and in my periphery my most recent experience with this is the book “Bat Eater and Other Names For Cora Zeng” by Kylie Lee Baker. This was a new kind of Kylie Lee Baker for me, as I read her book “The Keeper of Night”, which is a YA dark fantasy. This book is a straight up adult horror novel. I didn’t know what to expect with her taking that on, but let me tell you, this book is FANTASTIC. A ghost story, a pandemic story, a story about the ugliness of white America, it has so many beats and notes that I just loved. And yes. It’s very, very scary.
The ghost story is what I will cover first, and it’s great. I have been very interested in Hungry Ghost mythology for awhile now, and Baker has our main character, Cora Zeng, haunted by a potential hungry ghost who may also be the ghost of her murdered sister Delilah, who was shoved in front of a subway in front of Cora. Cora doesn’t really believe in ghosts, but now there is a contorted and terrifying presence in her apartment that is following her wherever she goes, and messing with her mind, maybe. The descriptions of this ghost were SO terrifying I actually had to put the book down a couple of times, and Baker builds the dread up in ways that make the reader know that something is going to break, it’s only a matter of when. And when it does? MAN, it is SO scary and SO good.
But now I want to talk about the more realistic horrors of this novel, as to me so many horror novels really shine when they take on the real world scares. And in this book it is a combination of the terrifying unknowing of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the disgusting and violent racism hurled towards Asian Americans, particularly women, during this time and beyond. Cora works as a crime scene cleaner, and she and her coworkers (who are also of Asian heritage) have noticed a scary pattern of Asian American women being brutally murdered and having bats left at the crime scene. Not unlike when Cora’s sister Delilah was murdered by being shoved in front of a subway train by a white man, after being called ‘Bat Eater’. Baker has built up a disturbing serial killer story, but she pulls the rug out from beneath it in ways that felt all the more upsetting while also feeling tragically realistic, and perfectly captures the fear and anxiety that so many women like Cora were feeling as violence was being directed at them during this time period and beyond. And not just violence, but also the little cuts of racism that BIPOC deal with in everyday life, like Cora going to Church with her white Aunt who doesn’t realize that Cora feels VERY unwelcome, and refuses to understand why that may be. It’s enraging and heartbreaking all at once and it boosts the narrative impact.
And she also perfectly captures the tension and fear of the early days of lockdowns during the early days of the pandemic. Cora is VERY scared of contracting COVID, as this is pre-vaccine access AND set in New York City in 2020. You know, the place that had bodies spilling into streets from refrigerator trucks and constant siren wails throughout the Burroughs (my sister and her wife lived this, living in Brooklyn in a small apartment, only leaving to do laundry or go grocery shopping). It’s such a close memory at this point, and Baker nailed it. I was actually shuddering to myself as Cora would start to have an anxiety attack while in public over the fear of contagion, because I was once in that same place, where I would hyperfocus and fret about getting sick just from grocery shopping, even when wearing my mask.
“Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng” is a phenomenal horror story about the things that haunt a person, be it trauma, racism, or actual ghosts. I highly recommend it.
Rating 9: A terrifying ghost story but also a deeply disturbing exploration of racism during the early days of the COVID 19 pandemic, “Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng” is an effective and searing horror novel.
Reader’s Advisory:
“Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng” is included on the Goodreads lists “Weird Girl Lit”, and “Diverse Releases of 2025 – Mystery, Thriller, Horror”.
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