There hasn’t been enough time since the pandemic lockdown for it to have gained any nostalgia. There might never be. So while we writers had plenty of time to type away during those months of isolation and worry, and even though enough of those books are hitting shelves to give us a whole subgenre of pandemic fiction, it’s not something I particularly want to think about while reading. But Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng, the adult horror debut from Kylie Lee Baker, turns the lockdown, and the social and racial tensions that bubbled up during the course of it, is almost a character itself in this fun and chilling book.
Cora Zeng spends her days cleaning up crime scenes. It’s not glamorous work, but there’s satisfaction in cleaning bloodstains out of carpet or viscera from walls, and it keeps her busy and reasonably able to afford an apartment in New York City on her own after the murder of her sister a few weeks into the pandemic. Plus, her coworkers, Harvey and Yifei, aren’t bad. Things might even seem like they’re looking up, if it weren’t for the demonic-looking ghost of her sister that keeps following her around. Or the increasingly frequent crime scenes featuring young Asian women murdered in horrific ways.
As the trio cleans more and more of these gory scenes, they notice similarities that the police have either missed or are ignoring, such as the presence of dead bats at many of the murders. When her sister’s ghost gives her a USB drive that may contain evidence about the cases, Cora realizes that between the apparent serial killer and the hungry ghost on her heels, she has to solve this case or die trying—and it will probably be the second one.
Bat Eater is a marvelous friendship bracelet of plot threads that sometimes take turns and sometimes work in tandem but are always engrossing. At times, I was so invested in the developments of Cora’s haunting that I forgot about the serial killer; other times, the serial killer made the ghosts look like small potatoes. Here and there, Cora’s family drama added an extra knot to the whole thing, and all of it was wound around Cora’s anxiety, and how being in a global pandemic and of the marginalized group wrongly blamed for it really doesn’t help matters. Often, it’s easy for this kind of switching between the main and supporting plots to feel disjointed. In Bat Eater, all of it credibly feels like facets of a terrifying and claustrophobic world.
Emphasis on “terrifying;” this was a rare horror book that had me literally gasping more than once as a new threat was discovered or a secret was revealed. Once, I was so immersed that a neighbor’s car alarm made me jump. Hungry ghosts, the uncertain days of lockdown, a depraved killer on the loose, the lack of social safety that comes with prejudice, and even living on the financial edge make it feel like nowhere and nothing is safe, not even for the reader. That’s tempered by a quick pace and some well-placed gallows humor that also serve to make the frightening bits that much scarier by catching you off guard. By the end, it’s clear that there’s no escaping for Cora and no ignoring what’s unfolding around her—she can only turn off the light and press forward, hoping against hope that she’s smart enough to stay one step ahead of danger, even though she’s pretty sure she’s not. Meanwhile, the pandemic keeps advancing, hospitals keep filling up, cabin fever keeps ratcheting social tensions, and the ghosts grow hungrier with each passing day.
Bat Eater skillfully captures the strange fear and stagnation of the early days of the pandemic in a way that feels familiar, not tired, and then lets that be both backdrop and character in this story of grief and fear, corruption and redemption. It’s a rare book I wish I could read for the first time again, and one I’ll be pushing obnoxiously on any friend remotely interested in horror.
Ring Reads 