Exploring Racism in Bat Eater by Kylie Lee Baker

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About The Book 📚

Title: Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

Author: Kylie Lee Baker

Cover Art: I couldn’t find the cover artist. If you know them, please let me know.

Publication Date: April 29, 2025

Publisher: Harlequin Audio

Genre: Fantasy, Horror, Literary

Pages: 304

Setting: New York City

Click Here for Content Warnings (may contain spoilers)

Three Words That Describe This Book: grief, ghosts, gore

About The Author

“Kylie Lee Baker is the Sunday Times bestselling author of dark fantasy and horror novels such as The Keeper of Night, The Scarlet Alchemist, and Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng. She grew up in Boston and has since lived in Atlanta, Salamanca, and Seoul. Her writing is informed by her heritage (Japanese, Chinese, and Irish), as well as her experiences living abroad as both a student and teacher. She has a BA in creative writing and Spanish from Emory University and a MS in library and information science degree from Simmons University.”

https://www.kylieleebaker.com/about

My Review

› I absolutely LOVE the cover for Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng. The bat almost looks like it’s growing from the strange flowers. The mouth of the bath is slightly ajar, matching the word “eater” in the title. Somehow, the look on the bat’s face makes me feel sorry for it and worried for its safety. This is my first time reading Kylie Lee Baker’s work, and it certainly won’t be the last. This is her adult novel debut and horror debut. She has another adult horror book coming in 2026. On Goodreads, the title is listed as Japanese Gothic! I can’t wait to read that.

› Bat Eater is yet another book that shows horror is the perfect vehicle to tell the real-life atrocities, such as racism and hate crimes. The author has said she grew up reading a lot of horror, including Stephen King. Her first books were dark historical fantasy, and when some readers said they were scary, Baker decided to try writing with an intentional purpose to scare.

› Bat Eater begins with Cora and her sister Delilah waiting for a train in New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic. Cora has always looked up to her sister and wants to be more like her. A man calls Delilah a “bat eater” and pushes her onto the tracks, where she’s brutally killed by the train.

“He says two words, and even though the train is rushing closer, a roaring wave about to knock them off their feet, those two words are perfectly clear, sharp as if carved into Cora’s skin. Bat eater. Cora has heard those words a lot the past two months. The end of the world began at a wet market in Wuhan, they say, with a sick bat. Cora has never once eaten a bat, but it has somehow become common knowledge that Chinese people eat bats just to start plagues.”

Delilah’s death sends Cora into deep grief. Her parents aren’t around, and they don’t speak to each other much. She ends up taking a job as a crime scene cleaner, which may seem like a strange choice due to her sister’s death, however, Cora has OCD and cleaning up the mess is almost therapeutic for her. While cleaning up the crime scenes, Cora notices that many of the victims are Asian women. She suspects a serial killer murdering Asian women and leaving bats.

While this is happening at work, Cora is also experiencing strange things in her apartment. Her aunt warns her that the Hungry Ghost Festival is coming up, and the ghosts will be ravenous. She instructs Cora to feed them or they’ll become “hungry ghosts”. Cora sees an apparition and thinks that it’s her sister’s “hungry ghost” because she didn’t feed Delilah’s spirit as her aunt instructed. One day, while cleaning a crime scene, a ghost leads her to find a USB – this leads her to look further into the deaths of the Asian women and uncovers more than she ever expected.

› What does the title mean? Bat-eater is a derogatory term used to insult Asian people. It originated from misinformation that the COVID-19 pandemic started from an Asian person eating a bat. This led to an increase in hate crimes against Asian people. I actually thought that’s how COVID-19 spread to humans, and I feel horrible that I didn’t bother to look that up to see if it was true. We now know that the most likely explanation is wildlife trade.

› Bat Eater has strong character development and a diverse cast. Cora is biracial and feels like an outsider. Her cleaning coworkers have become more than just friends, and the side characters are also well-developed – Auntie Z is my favourite. When she shows up at Taco Bell!! – Awesome scene. I loved the description of the setting and the atmosphere in general. Baker’s writing style is incredible, and I enjoyed the dark humour. Other readers have said they felt the ending was rushed and unsatisfying, but I thought it was great. I enjoyed the mysterious parts of the story, didn’t see the reveals coming, and didn’t want to put it down! Bat Eater is one of the best books I’ve read in 2025.

Quotes That Stuck With Me

“Many people think that death is the end. The ending of pain, of hate, of love. But these things are not so easy to erase. Any kind of wanting leaves a scar. The living are good at forgetting, the years smoothing out memories until all the days of their lives are nothing but rolling planes of sameness. But in Hell, it is always just yesterday that everything was lost. The dead do not forget.”

“Closing your eyes doesn’t stop monsters from devouring you.”

“Cora thinks about the Girl with a Pearl Earring, and the Mona Lisa, and all the beautiful women immortalized in oil paint, and wonders if they said cruel things too, if their words had mattered at all or just the roundness of their eyes and softness of their cheeks, if beautiful people are allowed to break your heart and get away with it.”

“On the fifteenth day of the seventh month, a door opens. The starving dead crawl out, mouths full of dust, and reach for a home that has already forgotten them. Their stomachs scream for food, but their tongues are heavy and dry, their necks as thin as needles. They lick the tears of the living from the dirt, and sometimes, it is enough to sate them. But sometimes, the hunger only yawns wider.”

“On the last day of the seventh month, a door begins to close. The dead cannot see their way back home, so they follow the lanterns down the river. The names of the dead are painted on the lanterns’ paper skins, and the lost souls chase its light like children after fireflies as they wander back through the gates of hell. When the last lantern is extinguished, the gates swing closed once more, and will not open until next year. No hands can pry the gate open. If you knock, no one will answer.”

“Fear is born in the after, when the world peels back its skin and shows you its raw, pulsing innards, when it forces you to remember its name. Anyone who has seen the face of fear knows you should damn well be afraid.”

“But maybe she wants this monster to have teeth, wants it to be some intangible, hungry darkness that can swallow all her rage like a black hole. She doesn’t want him to have a name, a job, a wife that he holds with the same hands he uses to gut Asian girls like fish. The thought sickens her, the idea that the kind of person who carves people like her open could smile at other people. That he could be loved by other people. Because what does that make Delilah and Yuxi and Zihan and Ai and Officer Wang? Subhuman, bat eaters, garbage to be taken out, people who don’t deserve his humanness. Cora wants him to be a formless ephemeral ball of pure evil, but she knows that he’s not. And she doesn’t care about his redeeming traits but she knows that other people will, that the newspapers will highlight his accomplishments, that the courts will talk about him being a good father or diligent worker or a thousand other things he did that matter infinitely less than what he took from Cora.”

“Cora Zeng does not get angry because anger always melts through her fingers until it is a pool of anguish under her feet. There is not enough oxygen inside Cora to keep anger burning. No matter how hard she tries, she can only wield her sharpest thoughts against her own f lesh. She knows, on some level, that most of the problems in her life are her own fault in one way or another. Anger is just one of those thoughts that can never quite sink its teeth into her—she is not solid enough, and its jaws close around nothing at all.”

APPEAL FACTORS
Storyline: character-driven, issue-oriented, own voices, tragic
Pace: medium
Tone: emotional, bittersweet, moving, sad, dramatic, mystical, suspenseful, thought-provoking, dark, informative, mysterious, sinister, bleak, creepy, gruesome, haunting
Humour: dark humour
Writing Style: well-crafted dialogue, attention-grabbing, compelling
Character: authentic, awkward, complex, flawed, likeable, relatable, strong female, well-developed, diverse
Disability representation: mental illness, neurodivergence
Racial Representation: Asian
Audio: character accents, emotionally connected, clear

Read Alikes:
Monstrilio by Gerardo Sámano Córdova
Yellowface by R. F. Kuang
The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim
You Know What You Did by K. T. Nguyen
The Fervor by Alma Katsu

› In the past, I have given a rating out of ten and converted that to a star rating, but I’m no longer giving a star rating here on my blog. I will continue to do that on Goodreads and The Story Graph.

› Final Thoughts
• Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng is a poignant novel about mental health, grief, found-family, and the danger of misinformation. It carries an important message about racism and the Asian hate experience during the COVID-19 pandemic. I came away feeling like I had a better understanding of an experience outside of my own.