An absolutely brutal spiral into the fear-soaked streets of NYC at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, mixed with hauntings and hungerings from the ghosts who are shoved out of the public’s eye and the public’s memory.

Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng follows Cora, who works as a crime scene cleaner in Chinatown after her sister Delilah was pushed in front of an oncoming subway train right in front of her. 

She shoulders anti-Asian hatred, tucks herself away to avoid all germs, and numbly nods along to her aunt’s insistence that she prepare for the Hungry Ghost Festival.

Delilah’s murderer has never been found, and the only things Cora has to go on were a spidery white hand and two terrible words: bat eater. And now as she cleans up the crime scenes of East Asian women and finds bats in their walls, Cora realizes that the hungry ghosts her aunt has desperately warned her about might actually be manifesting. Unless it’s all in her head.

It’s an incredibly dark story, with body horror & gore and scenes that will shock you. And chilling social commentary - real world terror - is mixed with hungry bottle-necked ghosts hopping from shadow to shadow, desperate to consume their way back into reality. The result is a terrifying cocktail that feels firmly rooted in our world, but also might make you take a double look at every shadow.

There’s so much hate blossoming from fear & then manifesting into the various antagonists here. And heart-wrenching scenes - moments where trauma reshapes itself into silenced ghosts. It’s a scary story, but there are also moments of levity, cleverness, and joy.

Cora learns the power of seeing and naming others. She learns to find her inner strength and push past her limits to adapt and exist in a world filled with germs and cruelty and fear. She finds a new respect for traditions that she shrugged off and felt disconnected to in the past. She slowly starts to understand that building community and trust is crucial if you want to survive all sorts of diseases, whether they’re literal pandemics or metaphorical infections of hatred.

I held my breath through so many of these pages. I was never quite sure what was going to happen next, and had NO idea who was going to survive the story. 

It forces you to reflect on who we choose to sacrifice, to bury, and to ignore. It explores strained family relationships, mental health, and how racism flourishes when one group turns another into an easy scapegoat, even when the elements of blame are completely nonsensical and contradict each other. 

Kylie Lee Baker crafted a terrible, brilliant, devastatingly haunting story that is going to stick with me.

CW: murder, death, grief, mental illness, gore, hate crime, racism, pandemic, blood, body horror, child abuse, car accident, animal death/cruelty, fire, sexism, racial slurs, vomit, forced institutionalization (mentioned), sexual harassment, police brutality (mentioned)

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(I received an advance reader copy of this book; this is my honest review.)