Review: Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng (Spoiler-Alert)

I picked this up at BookCon because I attended Kylie Lee Baker's panel, and I'm always convinced to read an author's book once I've heard them speak about the process of writing it. I was further convinced it should be my next read when I discovered it is set in New York.

The city is a great backdrop for this pandemic novel; the ooze of the subway and the eerie silence of what should be packed streets are perfect in capturing the inherent wrongness of how the world felt as COVID-19 swept across it. (I truly feel like the setting is a net positive on the story, but I have to point out one error that I can't believe made it past the editors: Kylie Lee Baker is not from NYC, and in one scene the protagonist "taps" her MetroCard. MetroCards were swiped, not tapped!!)

The plot is decent, and I really enjoyed how Chinese mythology is woven into this contemporary horror setting, but some of it unravels at the end for me. For the majority of the novel, we are led to believe that a serial killer is stalking our protagonists. Eventually, we discover that it's not one killer, but a series of copycats. That's a perfectly fine development of the plot, but it doesn't really make sense why the main crew were being targeted all at the same time at the end if it wasn't by one person. So that kind of took me out of the story.

The prose itself is the standout, so much so that it alone is enough to make me want to read her next novel. I think Baker's writing will shine even brighter in a gothic tale.

Overall, this is an easy horror read, and definitely one I'd recommend to beginners of the genre. The paranormal elements are very straightforward, and the story is rooted in our world. I prefer more ambiguous, sometimes cosmic, horror, so this didn't reach new heights for me, but it was solid.