Book Review | Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

About the Book

Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zheng is the dark story of one young Chinese woman amid the 2020 COVID-19 Pandemic. This book starts with a lurch, toppling the reader off balance and setting the tone for the tale to come. Cora and her sister, Delilah, were just like most of us at the start of the pandemic – braving the outside to get toilet paper of all things. As the two young women waited alone on a subway platform, eager to get home, neither could predict what would happen next. A man appears and all too fast Cora’s sister is flung into the oncoming train, violently murdered right before her eyes. Cora could hardly remember anything about her sister’s murderer but she remembered what he called them – Bat Eater. 

One would not call Cora a well adjusted individual before the death of her sister but in the aftermath of Deliah’s murder Cora has become a black hole. Kylie Lee Baker takes you into the mind of Cora Zheng to live within the dark pit of her thoughts and you see the bleakness of the world through her eyes. The world does not stop for Cora Zheng and like the rest of us she needs money to survive, even if she’s convinced the pandemic might just be the end of the world. She takes an unconventional job as a crime scene cleaner and as someone with intense OCD the rigorous cleaning was something Cora knew she could do. 

She makes tentative friends with her co-workers, Harvey and Yifei, who are perhaps just as odd as Cora in their own ways. The unlikely trio find themselves with a front seat view of a serial killer’s destruction as crime scene after crime scene they’re tasked to clean spell out a gruesome picture of East Asian women brutally murdered in their NYC apartments. If the daily horror of gore wasn’t enough there is something else lurking in the edges of Cora’s mind, a darkness she can’t seem to shake.

My Thoughts

The story Kylie Lee Baker has crafted is a heavy one. It felt as though a weight had settled on my chest as I followed Cora through her new dark reality. Cora’s mind is a labyrinth of depressive and desperate thoughts. On the outside she is committed to pretending everything is fine, though it doesn’t seem like a convincing act. Cora sees herself as the absence of a person or at best the dim echo of her sister. I found myself fascinated at this exploration of Cora’s views on herself and of her sister.

In grief and despair she finds herself hating Delilah but missing her. She resents her for leaving her, but she resents her too for the things she did while she was still alive. Cora loves her and despises her and cannot have one without the other. Cora doesn’t know who she is or even who she wants to be. Even in her sister’s death, Cora feels like she’s only being pulled around by the whims of the ghost haunting her.

There is so much here to examine and dissect. As I started reading, I started to remember what was going through my mind during the lockdown in 2020. The bleak and isolating thoughts I recalled were so well echoed in the narration. The pandemic brought out new sides to people and some of them were better left buried, but in Bat Eater Kylie Lee Baker unearths these ugly realities and asks the reader to confront them. There is so much biting commentary on the Anti-Asian sentiment that the pandemic shoved to the fore, and dressing it up in the context of a horror, I think well illustrated how devastating and terrifying the outcomes of this kind of rhetoric are.

I enjoyed Kylie Lee Baker’s writing. The way she describes things, even things we see as mundane, are so visceral, bordering the grotesque. There are moments of levity here and there in this story but I would say it sits very squarely in the horror category. This is Kylie Lee Baker’s debut adult horror novel and I am eager to see what kind of story she writes next.