Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng by Kylie Lee Baker
Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng
by Kylie Lee Baker
Horror | Mystery | Thriller
304 Pages
Released January 2025
Rating: ★★★
Goodreads
Content Warnings
This book was arguably one of my most anticipated reads of the year. And while I mostly enjoyed it, I found myself struggling through parts of the story.
This book follows Cora after the horrific, racist murder of her half-sister. Despite her mental health issues, Cora has managed to eke out a life working as a crime scene cleaner with her two friends, x and y. But Cora can’t help but notice the murders lately have something terrible in common - they’re all asian women. Taking place during the height of COVID-19, Cora not only struggles with the notion that she is cleaning up after a serial killer but also the psychological struggle of grief.
This book was a bit of an enigma to me, and by that I mean I really struggled placing it into a particular category. It’s a bit like the author couldn’t decide what kind of book she wanted to write and so it became a little bit of everything - a commentary about asian racism especially during COVID, an internal struggle with heritage and coping with complex grief, a murder mystery.
The book had good atmosphere, Baker does a great job bringing the stifling feeling during COVID to life. There’s layers of tension, both from the killings that take place in the book, Cora’s mental health issues, and her manifestations of grief.
I found the main characters of this book to be interesting and I loved their interactions throughout the story.
The horror elements were also really solid but this is where I struggled a bit. I enjoyed the body horror elements but there are some psychological horror elements that shifted into real life horror that caught me off guard. I’m not quite sure how to explain it. There are types of horror that, no matter how unrealistic, feel appropriate for the scope of the story. In this book, the horror elements felt more like potential plot holes and left me with questions instead of allowing me to focus on what the author was trying to convey.
I had a really hard time writing this review because ultimately, the book fell short of what I was hoping it would be, even though the horror aspects, atmosphere and characters were great. I think, ultimately, it was trying to achieve too much too quickly.
That said, if you are a horror fan, especially one rooted in social and psychological commentary, I think you would like this.