Nik vs. Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

Kylie Lee Baker’s novel shares a different side of the Covid-19 pandemic, one of supernatural horror and human cruelty. But which is more frightening?

Title: Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

Author: Kylie Lee Baker

Genre: Horror

Pages: 304

Format: Hardcover/Paperback/ebook/Audiobook

What was lifelike for you during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic?

Did you have family, friends, or colleagues who helped you feel like you weren’t coming untethered from the world you knew before the sickness started to spread? I hope you did.

Not everyone was so lucky.

Unfortunately, for crime scene cleaner, Cora Zeng, everything she’s experienced since the early days of the pandemic has only led her to feel increasingly untethered and more disconnected from the world around her. Starting with the brutal murder of her sister–shoved in front of a subway train in an act of anti-Chinese violence–as she looked on helplessly, and continuing through the strange and seemingly related crime scenes she and her colleagues are discovering, the world around Cora serves to confuse and frighten her even further.

When she begins to believe she’s being haunted by the ghost of her deceased sister, everything quickly spirals out of control. Forced to come to terms with a world that’s less stable and sane than she believed it to be, Cora finds herself, her only two friends, and her aunt navigating both a city plagued with a conspiracy of violent, racist murderers and a dangerous supernatural existence operating by a set of rules Cora previously dismissed as fantasy and only barely understands.

Kylie Lee Baker shares a haunting story of bigotry, grief, and trauma amid the isolation and fear that accompanies a global pandemic; and in the process, provides many of us with a glimpse of societal cruelty and indifference that we might not have been privy to as we did our best to make it through to the other side alive and healthy.

Baker’s writing brings the characters to life and paints a picture of American society–informed by lived experience–that more of us could benefit from witnessing, while giving us a tantalizing look at Chinese folklore.

In the end, as frightening as the hungry ghosts populating this version of our world happen to be, it’s the undercurrent of racism and xenophobia that flows throughout the narrative that makes the story truly chilling. I suspect that was Baker’s intent, to show us that the unknown and unseen things we fear in the dark are far less terrifying and dangerous than the all-too-human monsters that live among us. Every time we heard someone refer to Covid-19 as the “China Virus,” we heard not-so-subtle assaults on the people of China and on Chinese Americans who may have been our friends and neighbors, and the fictional murders in Baker’s book are far from an implausible result of that kind of hate-mongering talk in the public forum.

I highly recommend this book, and not solely because we need more people to be reading work from authors with different cultural and ethnic backgrounds who aren’t afraid to infuse their fiction with unflinching portrayals of lived experiences that expose us to things that aren’t so familiar, and that may make us uncomfortable.

Nikolas P. Robinson is an avid consumer of books, movies, and television, especially where horror, science fiction, and fantasy are concerned. When he isn’t consuming media, he’s creating it as an author, photographer, videographer, and news producer in Portland, Oregon.

PLEASE NOTE: The views and opinions of the staff of Memento Mori Ink do not necessarily represent those of Memento Mori Ink or Crystal Lake Publishing. Thank you for understanding.