PRODUCER NIK VS. JAPANESE GOTHIC

Nik tells us why Kylie Lee Baker’s JAPANESE GOTHIC jumped to the top of his TBR pile.

October, 2026: Lee Turner doesn’t remember how or why he killed his college roommate. The details are blurred and bloody. All he knows is he has to flee New York and go to the one place that might offer refuge—his father’s new home in Japan, a house hidden by sword ferns and wild ginger. But something is terribly wrong with the house: no animals will come near it, the bedroom window isn’t always a window, and a woman with a sword appears in the yard when night falls.

October, 1877: Sen is a young samurai in exile, hiding from the imperial soldiers in a house behind the sword ferns. A monster came home from war wearing her father’s face, but Sen would do anything to please him, even turn her sword on her own mother. She knows the soldiers will soon slaughter her whole family when she sees a terrible omen: a young foreign man who appears outside her window.

One of these people is a ghost, and one of these stories is a lie.

Something is hiding beneath the house of sword ferns, and Lee and Sen will soon wish they never unburied it.

Title: Japanese Gothic

Author: Kylie Lee Baker

Genre: Horror

Pages: 352

Format: Hardcover / Paperback / eBook / Audiobook

After reading Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng, it was entirely guaranteed that I would be picking this one up when I saw it had come out, even before I’d had an opportunity to read the description. Upon reading the description, Japanese Gothic jumped up my TBR. I’m happy to say that I’m not the least bit regretful of this.

This was an excellent example of a book that starts the reader off believing one thing—thinking they have a feel for who a character is—only to have the rug pulled out from under them before the story concludes. And as Baker expertly displays, it’s not lies the author tells that lead us to our misapprehensions, but the lies the character tells themselves that reside at the heart of our flawed perception. Lee and Sen are both unreliable in their own ways, experiencing their lives through filters they’ve both developed by necessity—as a result of events that would have been shattering had they not hidden behind comforting fictions. Filters that have, by the time the story begins, become core elements of their respective identities.

As far as they may be separated by time and culture, these two characters with vastly different backgrounds manage to discover a familiar resonance within one another. Despite the cold, pragmatic motivations driving them in their mysterious interactions, they’re also propelled forward by curiosity and a strange, magnetic attraction to one another—and I don’t mean that in the romantic or sexual sense. The ebb and flow of the nature of their unlikely partnership flows between sincere compassion and antagonism, like the tides coming and going from the shore just beyond the sword ferns hiding the house.

There are horrors in these pages, but it’s not horrors of a supernatural variety that thread their way through the narrative Baker’s shared with us. It’s the horrors of what one human being can do to another, and the way they can manipulate others into becoming monsters along the way—whether intentionally or not.

Japanese Gothic lacks some of the cultural insight that I loved so much from Bat Eater, but it’s not that kind of book. That’s not to say there isn’t a great deal to learn from Baker’s novel, but more of it is centered around the history of Japan in the late 19^th century, and the end of the samurai as a class of people. It’s not unfamiliar ground to tread, but Baker sheds a different light on the time period and the samurai culture than most others who have explored that facet of history.

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.

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