Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

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.