Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

A Novel

Kylie Lee Baker

Let’s start here: This book is not for everybody. It’s brutal and gory, but it’s also a remarkable story about grief and recovery from the perspective of an Asian woman in New York during the pandemic. Dark, yes, and it’s an extraordinary book.

The quick setup is this: A Chinese American crime-scene cleaner in pandemic-era NYC is haunted by her sister’s death, hungry ghosts with some very specific demands, and the possibility that a serial killer is targeting women like her.

The story opens in April 2020, in the East Broadway subway station, during that weird time when nobody knew what was going on with Covid-19. Two sisters — Cora and Delilah — are waiting for a train. And for just a minute, we relive the quiet of lockdown and the weirdness of toilet paper shortage. Then a stranger walks by. He says, ‘Bat eater’ — and he shoves Delilah into an oncoming train.

As a reader, you are not spared anything about how horrible this would be, both the physical act and its repercussions, and, through the book, the ongoing grief, guilt, fear, and anger of its aftermath. That moment is given its full weight. The story shows you something terrible, then pulls up a chair and says, ‘Okay, let’s be honest about how scary this is.’

Chapter two skips ahead a few months. Cora has landed a job with a Chinatown dry cleaner that has pivoted during the lockdown to crime-scene cleanup. Cora doesn’t mind the work: It gives her some control in a world that is not under control. She finds a strange peace in the protection of the hazmat suit, and it throws her together with two coworkers. One talks too much, the other almost not at all. Both of them know how to keep a secret. Whether Cora likes it or not, she and they form a little crew.

As they clean up a bathroom together — a female Asian American doctor has died — they find a dead bat in the shower drain. Cora counts: How many of our recent jobs have involved Asian women? That’s the serial killer thread.

The other is that Cora’s sister, Delilah, comes back. In their family, the Hungry Ghost Festival is not just a date on the lunar calendar. It’s a Thing, with rules and repercussions. In this apartment, with its sticky radiator and bad corners, Delilah returns. And she doesn’t come back alone. This is all written with a lot of veracity. The ancient Chinese lore plays out against fluorescent lights. It’s sometimes funny and then, suddenly, it isn’t funny at all.

The author Kylie Lee Baker does a fantastic job of playing these threads against one another. There’s splatter horror — and the practical work of cleaning it up. New York City feels predatory to Cora, before and after there’s a hunter in it. Her grief returns as it would in life: sometimes unexpectedly, sometimes with a thought that the dead could have been a better sister, sometimes with anger. The ghosts feel like the embodiment of larger problems — misogyny, racism, failing institutions — without the book ever turning into a sermon. This is a possession story: What possesses you after a loss, what it takes to walk away from that, and what never leaves. The ending is amazing.

Cora is a character to love. She’s abrasive, anxious, and painfully self-aware. And Baker lets her be contradictory. Cora doesn’t ‘believe,’ and yet she washes her hands twice with mechanic soap and organizes her life around invisible rules. She resists ritual until ritual is the only thing that makes sense. There’s a running motif of cleaning — of surfaces, of memory, of guilt — that the book keeps examining. And Cora’s relationships are great. The coworkers become a trio to root for; there’s an aunt who weaponizes dumplings and ghost etiquette; and the sister bond refuses to collapse. It just gets richer as the novel goes along.

This book has real-world violence (especially against Asian women), graphic on-page gore, and frank depictions of trauma. That said, it’s also a book about care: the ways we try to clean what can’t be cleaned, the found families we build, and the stubbornness of hope in a city that sometimes feels like it will eat you.

April 2020

East Broadway station bleeds when it rains, water rushing down from cracks in the secret darkness of the ceiling. Someone should probably fix that, but it’s the end of the world, and New York has bigger problems than a soggy train station that no one should be inside of anyway. No one takes the subway at the end of the world. No one except Cora and Delilah Zeng.

Delilah wanders too close to the edge of the platform and Cora grabs her arm, tugging her away from the abyss of the tracks that unlatches its jaws, waiting. But Delilah settles safely behind the yellow line and the darkness clenches its teeth. — Kylie Lee Baker

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