Kylie Lee BakerFantasy · Young Adult
Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng
Synopsis
In the spring of 2020, as New York City locks down and anti-Asian hostility surges, twenty-four-year-old Cora Zeng watches a stranger shove her half-sister Delilah in front of an oncoming subway train, snarling the slur "bat eater" as he does it. Cora survives; her sister does not.
Months later, Cora scrapes by as a crime-scene cleaner, scrubbing away the aftermath of other people's deaths while barely holding her own grief and OCD in check. Then the bodies start turning up: East Asian women murdered across the city, each scene left with a bat. As the killings mount and hungry ghosts crowd the edges of her vision, Cora can no longer tell where trauma ends and the supernatural begins, and the answers lead back toward her sister's death.
Kylie Lee Baker's adult horror debut is a gory, darkly funny, and furious ghost story about racism, grief, and the violence of the pandemic years.
How it reads
Prose complexity 4/10
Content warnings (7)
RacismGoreGraphic ViolenceViolenceTraumaAnimal CrueltyDeath Of An Animal
- All the stars for horror and social commentary. I tend to shy away from books that take place during the pandemic because it all feels too fresh (what do you mean it's been 5 years?). But when I saw the synopsis of this, I knew that I had to pick it up. Following witnessing her half-sister's murder at a train station, Cora Zeng starts working as a crime scene cleaner in the middle of the 2020 COVID pandemic. Between a string of murders targeting Asian women, mental health issues, and the looming fear of Hungry Ghosts, Cora realizes that nothing she knows is what it seems. First and foremost - if you're a fan of horror movies such as The Grudge, The Ring, and even that one story with of the girl with the green ribbon around her neck - this book is definitely for you. The horror aspect of this book is SO well done, I genuinely had to put the book down and take a breath. The depiction of the ghosts, the fear of the dark, is so GRIPPING. You can feel the fear not only from Cora but those she surrounds herself with. And the crime aspect of this book? The graphic nature of the crime scenes - how each girl is murdered, it's chilling! A huge part of this book is also the Asian American experience - especially during 2020. As someone apart of the AAPI community - the hate and discrimination in this book was all too real. I could recount my own personal experiences of that time, the fear I felt when I was in an area that was not predominantly other Asians, In addition, the Cora's experience as someone who is half white, half Chinese is something that can be relatable for a lot of people. The embarrassment of not speaking your native tongue, the life between Western and Eastern religion. Kylie Lee Baker does an amazing job, touching upon these points with grace while still pressing the importance of addressing this issues. Thank you so much to HTP Hive, Harlequin Trade Publishing and the author for an ARC in exchange for a review.
- I LOVED this. I said early on that this quite possibly will end up as one of my top 5 reads of the year. At the halfway mark, up until the end, the book took a turn I was not expecting nor was I sure I liked. By the end though I enjoyed what it brought to the book. It was super interesting to read a book based in COVID times and the racism people experienced. I will also never say no to a book based in NYC.