Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

by Kylie Lee Baker ★★☆☆☆

It's April 2020. New York City is still mostly locked down from the pandemic, but Cora Zeng and her sister Delilah need toilet paper. The two Chinese American sisters venture out, find that rarest of early-pandemic commodities, and as they're waiting in the East Broadway subway station their world is forever changed. Delilah is accosted by a man in a black hoodie and a surgical mask. He utters two words—"bat eater"—grabs Delilah by the arm...and shoves her in front of the oncoming train.

"Delilah is leaning over the ledge, peering over the lip of the platform.

But Delilah ends just above her shoulders.

Her throat is a jagged line, torn flaps of skin and sharp bone and the pulsing O of her open trachea. Blood runs unstopped from her throat, swirling together with the rainwater of the rotting train station..."

Fast-forward four months, and Cora is working as a crime scene cleaner, a curious job choice for a germaphobe, but it pays enough to pay the rent in New York. She's still reeling from Delilah's murder, and despite pleas to the police, no progress has been made in identifying the white man in the black hoodie. Cora's job brings her close to several crime scenes, and she starts to notice a disturbing trend: many of her cleanups follow the murder of young Chinese women, and at multiple sites bats are left somewhere in the apartment. Cora and her companions on the crime scene cleanup crew start to suspect that there may be a serial killer on loose, one who is specifically targeting Chinese.

It's a compelling premise and start to the book...but then things get weird. And racist. The book is marketed as horror as opposed to a mystery/thriller, and when Delilah's "hungry ghost" starts haunting Cora, the story becomes mostly focused on that. Ghost Delilah seems to want to help Cora solve her murder, though, and she helps her uncover clues for the case. The overt racism was where I struggled more with this one. It's one thing to create a singular character—Delilah's serial killer— with a vendetta against a particular group. But author Kylie Lee Baker paints all white characters in the novel in different shades of bigotry. This is everything from outright racist slurs, to strangers spitting on Cora, to a Catholic church congregation complaining that Cora is allowed to attend because "people (are) afraid of getting COVID" from her. Baker goes on an extended rant near the end of the book, where she says things like "to white men there's no difference between Chinese and Koreans. Asian women are all just prized sex dolls until the moment they say no," and "a bat eater is the kind of person that white men want to hurt, the kind of person who tangles their fear and hate together and elicits their rage, the kind of person who scares them."

I feel bad for Baker. In her author's note, she says the novel "focuses on the discrimination faced by a group of Chinese Americans because this is my personal experience." I don't doubt that she has been the victim of disgusting racism. It's terrible that she had those experiences. But she has taken outliers and ascribed their behavior to the entirety of society, which is its own form of racism. That deluded world view must make it hard to get out of bed and interact in public, when one perceives everyone is as bigoted and racist as the worst people she's encountered. It's sad, and unfortunately her own pain and hate permeate her well-written novel.

I think I've come to realize that ghost novels are not for me. I don't find them scary or creepy—I generally just find them absurd and silly, and Bat Eater was no exception. Baker's "rules" for her ghosts are fairly all over the place, adding some clunkiness to the interactions that characters have with them. I think Baker could have made salient points about the pervasiveness of Anti-Asian hate, especially during the pandemic, in a more elegant way, but her depictions were so out of balance that it continuously bumped me from the story. All of that combined to form a novel that was more imbecilic than terrifying, and a message about hate that failed to land as effectively as I'm sure she hoped. I won't be recommending this one to anyone.