BOOK REVIEW | BAT EATER | KYLIE LEE BAKER

 

 

                                                      

 

Today's review is Bat Eater by Kylie Lee Baxter. This is a book that I picked up recently and I have to say that I blown away by this book and it has already become a contender for one of my best books of the year.

ABOUT THE BOOK

 

Cora Zeng is a crime scene cleaner. But the bloody messes don't bother her, not when she's already witnessed the most horrific thing possible: her sister being pushed in front of a train.

But the killer was never caught, and Cora is still haunted by his last words: bat eater.

These days, nobody can reach Cora: not her aunt who wants her to prepare for the Hungry Ghost Festival, not her weird colleagues, and especially not the slack-jawed shadow lurking around her doorframe. After all, it can't be real - can it?

After a series of unexplained killings in Chinatown, Cora believes that someone might be targeting East Asian women, and something might be targeting Cora herself.

Soon, she will learn . . . you can't just ignore hungry ghosts.

REVIEW

Back in the days of the pandemic, the world was a weird place. The streets were deserted, the world seemed to be at a standstill, and everyone was fighting for toilet paper.

In the midst of this, Cora Zeng and her sister Delilah are on the hunt for some toilet paper, because as Cora identifies, it’s strange what people will covet at the end of the world.

Travelling through this post-apocalyptic world, Cora and her sister are determining their futures, with Delilah informing Cora that she is moving to China to be with her father. However, this future is violently cut short when Delilah is murdered at the hands of an unknown assailant.

Following the incident, Cora tries to rebuild her life and gets a job as a crime scene cleaner where her and her friends notice that there is a pattern to the killings. Young Asian women are being murdered. Each time, they attend a new scene the Modus Operandi becomes more evident, and it points to a serial killer on the loose.

Added to this, it is the month of Hungry Ghosts and Cora starts to realise that she is being haunted as things in her meticulously clean flat are out of place.

Without the addition of the supernatural this book has a high level of nervous energy as Cora is a germaphobe, Obsessive Compulsive and socially anxious. She goes through her daily existence with high levels of agitation that makes everything nightmarish. She gets abuse hurled at her and in one incident makes a catastrophic mistake with her aunt’s priest that leads to a confrontation that is particularly uncomfortable.

However, the addition of the supernatural the book has an added dimension that increases the horror two fold.

Bat Eater deals with a lot in between the pages of the book. It deals with the racism and xenophobic anger directed towards the Chinese population during the pandemic, the grief and anger that Cora feels at both the death of her sister and the treatment of the Chinese and wider South Asians population both during and after the pandemic. In addition, there is the displacement that Cora feels being of both Chinese and American descent.

Whilst Bat eater is a horror story, there is a very real prescience to the topics raised with the anger being palpable throughout the story, but that is not all. There are some brilliant character relationships that give the book its heart as Cora eventually learns to let other people into her world and form and develop relationships outside her insular little world of routine and ritual. 

Bat Eater and other names for Cora Zeng is an enthralling and mesmerising read that will haunt you well after you have finished.