Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng: A Darkly Funny, Gory, and Ghostly Horror Novel

As the world (and especially its governments) does its best to move on from COVID-19, now is a more important time than ever to tell stories of the hell we all went through. Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng is one of those stories.

COVID is raging in New York City. Everyone is in lockdown. People are getting sick; people are dying. Cora Zeng has the unenviable job of being part of a three-person team that cleans things up. Only this isn’t a case of cleaning up after very sick people have died and been taken to the morgue; these are the leftover scenes of grisly murders happening around the city. What makes it worse is that the victims are East Asian.

But Cora has already been pushed to the limit: when she saw her sister pushed in front of a moving train on the subway platform and horrifically killed, as the words “bat eater!” were yelled at her. With this constant dread weighing on her, Cora also keeps finding bad carcasses at these crime scenes. Then things come to a head with the Hungry Ghost Festival.

Kylie Lee Baker brings a darkly humorous story to readers with a grounding in a reality many of us are all too familiar with.