BAT EATER AND ANOTHER NAMES FOR CORA ZENG - Kylie Lee Baker

4.5 stars

The pandemic. Discrimination against Asians. Hungry ghosts. A string of murders. And the death of a sibling. Bat Eater pulls no punches and is happy to do it. It wants you to witness.

Full disclosure: I would never have picked up this horror novel if not for the Evernight subscription box. I usually avoid sibling death in all things as it's one of the worst realities I can imagine for myself and, frankly, I don't want to read about it in any context. But this book came to me via a subscription box, and so I felt I needed to give it a go. It would only be polite, right?

When I tell you I was hooked by the first few chapters—wow. This author really captured my attention with just a few extremely well-constructed scenes. And then we were off to the races, this book and I, and I finished it in one day.

Cora Zeng's entire life changes on one fateful day in the first few weeks of the 2020 COVID pandemic in New York City. Her and her sister traveled far looking for toilet paper—remember the TP panic??—and they finally found some in China Town. They're in the subway waiting alone for the train when the unthinkable happens. A white man in disguise pushes Cora's sister onto the tracks. She's dead.

In the aftermath of the unthinkable, Cora weathers the pandemic with poor grace. She's in heavy grief, she's dealing with some severe mental health struggles in the OCD and germophobic vein, and she's almost completely alone and afraid. Oh, and jobless and broke.

So she picks a job that makes no sense for her set of personal issues, but a job is a job in this pandemic landscape: she becomes a crime scene cleaner.

Cora notices a disturbing pattern: she's cleaning up an inordinate amount of Asian women's gruesome deaths. All of them horrifically involving bats.

Bat eater = the derogatory slur toward Asian people that spread around during the pandemic due to the false and bigoted concept that the COVID virus came from bats>Asian people eat bats>Asian people are the source/problem of the pandemic.

Between the horrifying deaths, Cora's grief, and the newly emerging sense that some sort of violent ghost is following her—despite her lack of belief in ghosts—Cora's left with no way out but through. She'll get to the bottom of these mysteries before the mysteries come for her.

Oof. Bat Eater was gripping... but also heavy. It needed to be, given its heavy topics and the larger conversations that the author wanted to highlight in regard to anti-Asian discrimination, how hate crimes against Asians rose during the pandemic, and how the lingering traumas of that time are still with us as a culture.

So much of our media doesn't address or acknowledge the pandemic. Don't you think that's strange? Maybe you don't—maybe you, like me and everyone else, don't like to think about that time period of fear and mass hysteria that dominated our lives for years and really set us back, globally, on a massive scale. We became more animal versions of ourselves, we isolated more than just our bodies, we unlearned our niceties, we stripped our generations of valuable skills and removed a lot of their social protections. It makes so much sense why a horror novel should include the pandemic—what was the pandemic, if not our own global horror story?

To combine the pandemic horror + Chinese hungry ghost storyline + a grief narrative was a deftly done, heavyweight punch. Hats off to Kylie Lee Baker for making a novel that is hard to read but very well done. I recommend it to all who can handle the subject matters mentioned.