Blood and gore, incisive social commentary, ghost story and literary thriller all meet in this pretty sensational adult horror novel by Kylie Lee Baker.

I am just about the furthest thing from a horror novel/ghost story fan you could find, but Bat Eater got me good. It’s the sort of book where you immediately want to write a review upon finishing it for a combination of reasons - because it leaves you reeling, because you hope that writing a review will purge you of nightmares about it (consider yourself warned: it is deeply disturbing in parts) and because it’s really just a very good book that deserves to be read and discussed.

If this was a pure horror novel it wouldn’t have worked for me but it’s not. There are depths to it, exploring online discourse, the pandemic, grief and loneliness, the fetishisation of Asian women and endemic racism against the Asian community in the US, all of running seamlessly through tales of hungry ghosts and bloody crime scenes. It’s playful at times too, despite the horror.

Cora is a biracial Chinese American woman who works as a crime scene cleaner. She’s also a germaphobe with mental health issues, not least because she witnesses the gruesome death of her sister Delilah. In the aftermath, Cora is haunted by the hungry ghost of her sister while her aunts (one Chinese and one American) cajole her into turning to their gods (one Chinese and one Christian) to help direct her life. As violence against Asian women ratchets up during the Covid pandemic, Cora is faced with hunting down a serial killer and assuaging her sister’s hungry ghost.

The book reaches a thrilling and terrifying climax that I could not look away from. Anyone who knows me on here knows ghosts are not my thing so it takes a good ghost story to grab me. This is one such one. I can see this one on prize lists perhaps. Haunting. 4/5⭐️

Many thanks to the publisher @hodderbooks for the arc via @netgalley. As always, an honest review.

"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 ysterday that everything was lost. The dead do not forget."


Kylie Lee Baker's novel is about Cora Zeng, a crime scene cleaner in Chinatown. She has witnessed some of the worst things possible, but the one that she can never forget is when her sister was pushed in front of a train. The person that did this whispered "Bat Eater" before they left. Months go by where the killer isn't caught, strange things appear to Cora, she is frightened and trying to make sense of what is happening. She doesn't take her aunt's warnings of preparing for the Hungry Ghost Festival seriously. Until things take a turn and now more than ever she needs help.


This book was a tough one to read. In the sense that it was a horror novel and the one which it depicts accurately is the racism and hate that spread across the world during Covid. It grasps and makes the readers relive those times in great detail and brings to light what was being experienced by many people.


With this very real portrayal of Covid which Cora worked through bringing her to a job cleaning up crime scenes, the story introduces us to a possible serial killer, the way in which the victims are left is disturbing, the visuals alone would make most uncomortable.


The author manages to tell a gruesome story whilst touching on folklore and the very real events of the pandemic. I could not put this book down. As much as it infuriated me reading it, it also told a gripping horror tale that I haven't forgot about since finishing this book.

4 stars.
Set during Covid-19; Cora is being haunted by something, she is dealing with grief and there seems to be a serial killer targeting Asians.
I loved this, the pacing was perfect! The cast of characters is small but it helped to keep the relationships and characterisation smooth. I loved the culture added into this, it was explained very well to a novice through Cora as she is Chinese American and is a bit lost between the divide in cultures. This is a perfect horror to lick up for someone who doesn’t read much of that genre. You can really feel the unravelling that is happening to Cora, a little psychological horror. With the plot uncovering a “serial killer” there is a little mystery/crime thrown in.
I’ve read Kylie Lee Bakers scarlet alchemist duology and loved it but she can write horror just as well!
Thank you to NetGalley and hodder & stoughton for the opportunity to read this.

Thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the ARC.

I'm not the biggest fan of horror, but this book had such an amazing story and characters, that I got pulled in! The ending left me a bit sad, but overall a very strong story!

4.5 stars

Rating – 4.5⭐️

This is such a powerful story! Adult horror isn’t a genre I would usually pick up because I’m a big scaredy cat and this one DID creep me out but in the BEST WAY POSSIBLE!!! I read some of it at night and immediately regretted it so I had to continue reading only during daylight😂.

I’ve read this author’s The Scarlet Alchemist Duology and loved how dark it was. Bat Eater takes it up to the next level with how dark and gruesome it was.

I loved Cora as a protagonist! From beginning to end, I was rooting for her! She’s a coward, she feels worthless, powerless and the type to hide behind someone else. But she’s also just trying to survive during the pandemic and faces lots of discrimination as a biracial Chinese woman whilst also dealing with the murder of her sister, who may have returned as a hungry ghost to haunt her🫣.

I also really loved the side characters, Harvey and Yifei🥹. They’re her crime scene cleaner coworkers and they each have dark pasts that haunt them. They end up forming an unlikely friendship that I adored😭🫶🏻. However, they realise they’ve been cleaning up more and more crime scenes of Asian women murdered by a serial killer on the loose👀.

This was definitely one of the more interesting books I have read recently, it solidified my love of body horror.

I’ve had this on my list for a while and the opening chapter really hooked me in!

There was definitely a spate of pandemic novels just after the pandemic which felt too soon, but this felt long enough ago to serve as a reminder of exactly what it was like.

There was a lot I liked about this. I loved how gory it was and not afraid to go there. I thought the perspective was really engaging and I really liked the crime element of the plot.

Though the ghosts part, which is pretty much the entire second half of the book, completely lost me. I just wasn’t interested and wasn’t engaged which was a shame.

Started out as a 4, ended as a 3 so a 3.5 all in all.

I think this could be the book that gets a cult like following this year. It’s 3 books in one, part reflection on 2020 from a Chinese-American woman’s perspective, part supernatural horror, part crime thriller. All parts are written so well and blend seamlessly into an excellent book.

The author’s note at the end is heartbreaking and so poignant. Overall this book is a must-read.

Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng was the most horrifying and absorbing novel I read recently. Once I started, it was hard to put down. It perfectly blends the scary ghosts, murder mystery and pandemic paranoia to the point I wasn’t sure which part of the novel scared me more.

Cora Zeng is a complex and fascinating character, but not an exceptionally reliable narrator. She is overwhelmed by her sister’s tragic death, her own lack of ambition or goals and the fact she doesn’t feel like she fully belongs in either American or Chinese culture. With the first supernatural appearance, we are unsure what is real, as Cora questions her sanity.

This novel is a gory and terrifying horror but is also a thought-provoking exploration of the recent pandemic. As the events in the murder mystery subplot escalate, we also see more racism towards East Asians. I found this element of the plot as horrifying as the supernatural aspect.

About 6 months ago, give or take, a friend and I had a conversation about horror fiction. I had just read Anna Bogutskya's Feeding the Monster, and was once again fascinated by horror, and seeking media to feed that hunger. Yet I found myself repeatedly disappointed. Nothing, I told my friend, went far enough. Nothing was sufficiently gory whilst maintaining both readability, and literary style. No book had it all. Nothing I could find was beautiful and horrifying, terror filled and perfectly paced. I didn't even want to mention films, which were trope filled or blood-drenched. No, I would have to be dissatisfied for ever. And then Bat Eater.

I requested this book because it sounded fascinating, I am a huge fan of the ghost story (I very nearly did a PhD on them, alas life) and I am an even bigger proponent of reading diversely, diving into new points of view, understanding the world, and, perhaps most importantly, of totally excellent covers. Bat Eater ticked all of those boxes. I was delighted by request got approved, and began reading this right away. It took me some time to get through thr first few chapters. It was intense, compelling, gory and creeping, and (I realised quite quickly) it would require my full attention. I hit pause, finished out my last few essays for the year (postgrads are not for the weak of heart, or short of time) and wrapped up the other books I had on the go, and then I tried again. I devoured this, racing through it in record time, pouring over it, staying up late to finish it, and then sitting with it for a few days. Letting it settle into me.

Bat Eater goes far enough. It goes further. It is the perfect balance of style, suspense, and character. This novel is unlike anything I have ever read before, because it is the horror novel I have been dreaming of when reading others. Something which never sacrifices commentary for the sake of gore, nor shies away from character development for the sake of the plot, or vice versa. To share the details of this book, any plot element really, would be to detract from its impact, so instead I will say this: Baker has penned some of the most sympathetic, genuine, engaging and loveable characters I have ever encountered, she has also penned some of the most brutal, soulless and (horrifically) mundane characters I have ever read of, and she has held them all together in a plot that is as fast and sharp as it is carefully plotted and suspenseful.

This novel is described in many places as being wickedly funny, and it absolutely is. I was pleasantly surprised by the banter and sharp sudden humour throughout. I was equally delighted by Cora's caustic wit, even if it is largely internal, and the way in which she viewed the world. The juxtaposition throughout of the modern and the traditional also added elements of humour, which added to the sense of unreality in places. This is a horror novel that is not funny in spite of itself, but which melds humour throughout, intensifying both through that juxtaposition.

I would mention here, because it is worth mentioning, that there are elements of this novel which will be deeply distressing to some. It is a horror novel, so no surprise, but it is one that is rooted in racism, specifically in Asian hate. We all know that Covid resulted in a significant uptick in hate crimes against people of broadly East Asian heritage, and it is against that backdrop that Baker writes this novel. I am a white woman, and my experience of reading this can only be through that lens. My responses will be, unconsciously, tempered by my whiteness, and I cannot say with any authority whether or not this is triggering more than it is cathartic, or representative more than it is sensational. What I will say, is that I found this to be a novel that cares for and explores the bothness of Cora Zeng, a woman who is both Chinese and American, and the way her cultures intersect, and fail to intersect. This novel also explores OCD in depth, another thing that some may find difficult to read, and touches on various incidents of child abuse / neglect.

I am hugely grateful to have been given a galley of this in exchange for an honest review. 5 stars.

Absolutely loved the genre blend of horror, mystery, literary, and even comedy in this book. Definitely a tough read but all the more rewarding with the ending. It's a timely discussion of BIPOC racism following the pandemic but I loved how Kylie Lee Baker positioned the story as a compelling, supernatural story.

Went into this book expecting a great horror and I was given that and some more!
This is an incredibly refreshing take on body horror and I really enjoyed how the author did not shy away from hard topics.
The female rage in the book will fuel me for years!

Thank you to NetGalley and Hodder & Stoughton for the advance reader copy.

I had requested this book as it was coming up in a subscription box and wanted to know a bit more before paying for it.

I found the premise interesting and the real world aspect was form very well. There’s a lot to be said about how people sank to racism during the pandemic and I feel like this provided a lot of insight.

Unfortunately I had to DNF at 42% as I found the story felt like it wasn’t progressing and I wasn’t a fan of the main character.

Absolutely captivating from the beginning. Reading this felt like riding a broken rollercoaster, unsure of how it could ever get worse. Baker has an incredible ability to juggle multiple themes without allowing any to become overshadowed. This book is both an exploration of Chinese folklore of hungry ghosts, a social and political commentary on Covid and the detrimental part the pandemic played in the extreme rise in normalised ‘casual’ racism towards Asian people, as well as the impact of something so dystopian as a pandemic plays on people with obsessive compulsive tendencies. A sharp and haunting tale.

one of my unexpected favourites of the year! visceral, horrific, awful, really taking you back to those early few months of covid and how it affected chinese people. really interesting and yeah really stuck with me.

First of all thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Somehow I found the start of this book to be quite slow paced, not inclusive of the first chapter. However, once I was a third of the way through I was gripped. Some nights I had to stop reading due to fear and I have had a few nightmares, but that is just how well this book is written.

Quite gory in places and the protagonist cannot quite trust her own mind at times. It was refreshing that when she told her friends about the ghost that there was instant belief. That friendship was quite sweet.

While this book did have supernatural horror, the more terrifying aspect of this book was the portrayal of real life horror. The horrifying acts that people will commit just due to someone looking a bit different from them.

If you only want to read one book set in COVID times, let this be it.

Thank you NetGalley and Hodder & Stoughton for the ARC.

Bat Eater made my stomach churn with its gore as well as the unwitting despair it instills in me as an East Asian woman. There's no story more terrifying for me than one that combines the supernatural as well as the undisputable horrors of real life. Kylie Lee Baker's prose is so vivid that I felt protagonist Cora's terror at practically everything around her—how she feels her safety is constantly being compromised. Safety in her home, in her own skin, in her mind. Her OCD and mysophobia already inflict enough anxieties for her to cope with. Now, she has to deal with literal Hungry Ghosts jumpscaring every now and then—seriously, it makes me think twice about sleeping under covers after this—and a series of murders fueled by racism & misogyny.

Baker unflinchingly describes the brutality of all the ways the Asian characters were tortured and then murdered. It's heavily discomforting, as it rightfully should be. There's a scene where a ghost literally DEVOURS a person whole in a gruesome manner, and yet that's still less skin-crawling and disgusting than the malice that came with these anti-Asian murders. The former is ruled by instinct, while the latter is purely irrational, bigoted hate.

On a lighter note, I very much enjoyed the odd little misfit friendships between Cora and her fellow crime scene cleaners, Harvey and Yifei. It especially helped that they also had their own past brushes with the supernatural, so we don't have to deal with the disbelief and gaslighting that typically happens when supporting characters don't buy the protag's distressed recounting of their haunting. Also kudos that Harvey's relationships with Cora and Yifei were strictly platonic. There's no time for romance right now; they're too busy figuring out how to lay a violent spirit to rest and avoid becoming the racist killer's next victims. Priorities are in check.

The characters, the plot and the unexpected reveals kept me intrigued that I wasn't bored at any point. That said, I had to put it down every now and then because of how emotionally distressing it can be, given the real-world setting of the pandemic and the wave of Sinophobia & anti-Asian hate that it incurred. Plus the fear all women face at the hands of men at some point of our lives. I did like the resolution, though it wasn't as satisfying as I would've liked.

Looking forward to more adult horror from Ms. Baker!

This is genuinely one of the best books I read this year. This book blew me away, it genuinely did.

The story, the themes and subject it touches upon, the way the author handles it with sensibility and sensitivity that I can only assume is genuine lived experience, as otherwise it would not feel so authentic, genuinely moved me. It had me emotional, fearful, regretful and so terribly sad about so many things, all at once, that I just. I have a lot of words, all positive, that I cannot put in a good sentence yet.

This is going to be one of the more anticipated books of 2025, and if you can get your hands on it when it publishes, and you are able to handle horror/gore, anxiety, and of course also themes and topics such as racism, hate crimes and extreme violence, read it. Genuinely.

Like I am not a girl who gravitates towards these books simply because I struggle with the horror aspect of it but this was so worth it. It is such an experience that brushes on both positive, joyful experiences while also not shying away from the awful, gritty, painful things that can happen in a life and that have happened during COVID and still happen today, while simultaneously love letter to finding community and purpose and strength within yourself and those you love and doing things that are difficult and *survival* that you just have to read it.

I'm going to begin this write-up by saying something decidedly controversial: Bat Eater might just be my top book of 2024.

As is expected of me, this one was chosen based on its cover and a small blurb on NetGalley, and I was rewarded with an incredibly vivid tale that had tension, horror, and plenty of disturbing scenes. But Bat Eater is also incredibly poignant, emotional, and sentimental in many ways.

We all remember life in 2020, when COVID was fresh and the world stood still. For me it feels like a distant memory and yesterday all at once. Sure I didn't experience it in New York like Cora does in the book, but the descriptions of deserted streets, unattainable toilet paper, and the downright mindfuck of a time it was to live through brought it all right back.

Cora is a crime scene cleaner, a job she begins following the brutal death of her sister. She befriends her two colleagues, and they eventually realise they might be cleaning up the murders of a serial killer. The harsh reality of life is mixed with the supernatural as Bat Eater explores Chinese myths and culture, and doesn't shy away from the heightened racism faced by Asians during the pandemic.

Bat Eater maintained its eeriness throughout, it was perfectly paced, it felt so desperate and despondent at times - utterly heart wrenching even - and there was plenty of intrigue, so much so that I finished it in just a few sessions. The supporting characters were fully-fleshed out, and I found myself rooting for them just as much as I was for Cora. Bat Eater is not afraid to show flaws in people, though it's done in such a way that allows humanity to shine through and I only found that to be even more endearing.

Truly there is nothing I didn't like about this book, and I cannot recommend highly enough that you give it a read at first opportunity. Please please please check it out, if only so I have people to talk about it with.

I’d like to extend many great thanks to NetGalley and Holder & Stoughton for giving me the opportunity to read this book in advance of publication.

Huge thanks to NetGalley and Hodder & Stoughton for the arc!

🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟/5

"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."

Thrilling and heartbreaking in equal parts, 'Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng' is an eye-opener of a novel that delves into the very real horrors experienced by Chinese people during the COVID-19 pandemic. In my opinion, it is also the horror genre at its finest. It started with a very impactful first chapter and left me breathless by the end.

Portraying gore that not only sickens the reader to their stomach but also serves an actual purpose and is not just gratuitous is a skill and KLB has done an amazing job. Bat Eater is not for the squeamish and the faint-hearted. The characterization was done incredibly well. Cora is someone who is a part of two worlds but doesn't quite fit into either. The side characters felt fully fledged out and added so much to the story rather than being just props. I did not expect Harvey and Yifei to have their own backstories, and they added so much depth to the story. I loved reading about the elements of Chinese religion and the hungry ghost festival. This book had some of the creepiest moments I've encountered in a book, courtesy of the hungry ghosts. But more than that, reading about these once-humans with dreams and desires of their own made me shed a few tears.

While the plot is propelled by the mystery of the serial killer's identity, the book is, at its heart, about how the most horrific acts are the very real atrocities committed by humans against their own kind. This is not a happy story. There isn't really any justice at the end, because that's just how the real world is. The characters face horrible, horrible things. However, it is a book worth reading. I wasn't very familiar with the anti-Chinese violence that skyrocketed in the US during the pandemic, but this made me realise the gravity of the situation. Please do not overlook the author's note at the end.

Overall, 'Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng' has excellent social commentary, genuinely scary moments, a very compelling plot and cast of characters, jaw-dropping plot twists, and an emotional gut-punch served right at the end. I hope it haunts you just as much as it did me.