Kylie Lee Baker's BAT EATER AND OTHER NAMES FOR CORA ZENG (Narr by Natalie Naudus)

There's something peaceful about your worst fear coming true.

Kylie Lee Baker would have been fun to have as a lab partner in high school biology, I decided about halfway through her creepy horror/crime hybrid Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng. She relishes the particular and intimate, yes, the gory, details of the insides of organisms, revels in the sensory details of textures felt and observed, how smells penetrate not only the nostrils and sinuses but also the back of the throat, if the substance giving them off is thick enough; the contrast of vividly colored internal organs and tissues to dulled and more uniform integuments and surroundings. 

So of course her heroine here is a specialty cleaner -- of murder crime scenes. And as we already know from comics and TV, that makes for an interesting enough character and milieu right there, but Baker has bigger and better ideas than the low hanging ones. 

Because, for starters, Bat Eater takes place in Manhattan at the height of the very first wave of COVID-19, when everybody who had the luxury was sheltering in place and hoarding toilet paper and being, perhaps selfishly?, grateful not to be among the corpses stacking up in hospital morgues, then meat lockers, then refrigerated trucks parked wherever they'd fit on the island -- and our heroine, Cora Zeng, is Asian. Specifically American-Born Chinese.

Oh, and just for extra fun, all of this kicks off just in time for the Festival of Hungry Ghosts, when the gates of hell open up and let the spirits of the dead roam the earth again, demanding attention and sustenance from their loved ones. Ignore them at your peril; they might take a bite out of your coffee table. Or out of you. Best to give them what they actually want, maybe?

I mean, if you believe that stuff.

And if you accept your Chinese aunt's insistence that you acquire symbolic objects made of joss paper and burn them as appeasement offerings to your dead, rather than your white and Catholic aunt's snobbish attitude that Hungry Ghosts and joss papers are just icky Asian superstitions and you should really just pray and confess and enact ritual cannibalism instead. 

Cora, you see, is half-white. But her older sister, Delilah, is fully Chinese. And, as Delilah observes of their situation in a poignant flashback to when they suddenly came into each other's lives after some familial drama finally brought them together, how they might feel about it won't charge the fact that they're family. So they might as well be more grown-up about it than their parents seem to have been, and stick together. 

Until suddenly, Delilah announces right before shocking tragedy strikes, that this whole pandemic thing has Delilah thinking about breaking up the team and heading back to China without her mei-mei, who isn't fluent in Mandarin or the local dialect their father's family speaks, and anyway Cora has nice white relatives she can maybe rely on like she does their father to send her a check from China each month to help cover NYC living expenses that are beyond his girls and their useless liberal arts degrees...

I still have a mostly negative attitude about Pandemic Literature. Too many people, I knew at the time and still maintain, decided that lockdown was the perfect time for them to finally sit down and write that novel they always knew they had in them, which, that's fine; we've been dealing with tidal waves of NaNoWriMo projects for years now and some of them have even been good, so this alone is no reason to dismiss a book, but too many of them have been about COVID-19 and the writer's personal experience of lockdown and toilet paper shortages and fear and germiphobia and putting their groceries under a UV light before putting them away (if privileged enough to have the money to spend on such a gadget) and all the rest of the, yes, mostly pretty common experience that most of the planet seems to have shared unless they were deemed Essential Workers and had to keep going to work at risk of their lives either as healthcare or grocery stockers or ambulance drivers... and didn't get to stay home and write that novel they've always known they had in them. I mean, there's only so many of those stories that I, personally, have patience for, and that number is pretty close to zero. Unless...

Unless someone has a different experience of this to share with me. Which the protagonist/narrator of Bat Eater most certainly does, for not only is she facing a new excuse for racism evoked by the title; as the Leader of the Free World and all of his minions declared while pushing the infamous "lab leak" hypothesis even as they also blamed it all on a wet market in Wuhan, China, lots of people at least claimed to believe that COVID-19 was all China's fault, and by extension the fault of every person they might encounter who even looks vaguely Chinese, even if they're third or fourth generation Americans with dim origins in completely different Asian countries than the one where Wuhan is, even if they don't speak any language but English, even if they're actually Native American but just kind of vaguely look Asian. Against whom it is now perfectly okay to discriminate and even enact hate crimes to punish the "bat eaters" for the disease and its impact on everybody's sudden inability to get a haircut.

I mean sure, racism is racism, but it has to have been extra bizarre and extra scary to suddenly get called "Bat Eater" before being spit on (which, get ready for all the bodily fluids in this story; it's not confined to the blood that Cora and her colleagues have to clean up in the crime scene du jour) or shoved or assaulted or -- here we go! -- murdered.

...maybe she wants this monster to have teeth, wants it to be some intangible, hungry darkness that can swallow all her rage like a black hole. She doesn’t want him to have a name, a job, a wife that he holds with the same hands he uses to gut Asian girls like fish. The thought sickens her, the idea that the kind of person who carves people like her open could smile at other people. That he could be loved by other people. Because what does that make Delilah and Yuxi and Zihan and Ai and Officer Wang? Subhuman, bat eaters, garbage to be taken out, people who don’t deserve his humanness. Cora wants him to be a formless ephemeral ball of pure evil, but she knows that he’s not. And she doesn’t care about his redeeming traits but she knows that other people will, that the newspapers will highlight his accomplishments, that the courts will talk about him being a good father or diligent worker or a thousand other things he did that matter infinitely less than what he took from Cora.

It would seem that there's a serial killer at work in Chinatown, targeting young, single Asian women who live alone. The killer bursts into their homes at night, brutally and spectacularly murders them in a variety of different ways, and then shoves a bat down their throats or otherwise inside their bodies, to make sure everybody Gets the Message. But so far, only Cora and her two colleagues, happy go lucky and kind of doofy Harvey (nephew of the Chinatown dry cleaning mogul who pivoted his business to crime scene clean-up when the pandemic meant nobody needed their work clothes professionally cleaned anymore) and sharply observant, intelligent and no nonsense Yi-Fei* (who is every bit as at-risk as Cora herself, being an actual immigrant from China who still has a bit of an accent), the found family Cora comes to rely on when her actual family seems to have let her down, seem to understand what's really going on. At least until they get the call to come clean the crime scene where a Chinese-American member of New York's finest has gotten the bat treatment. He would seem to have noticed as well. And to have paid dearly for noticing.

Cora Zeng does not get angry because anger always melts through her fingers until it is a pool of anguish under her feet. There is not enough oxygen inside Cora to keep anger burning. No matter how hard she tries, she can only wield her sharpest thoughts against her own flesh. She knows, on some level, that most of the problems in her life are her own fault in one way or another. Anger is just one of those thoughts that can never quite sink its teeth into her—she is not solid enough, and its jaws close around nothing at all.

Anyway, the relationship that develops between Cora and her co-workers -- a relationship she is in sore need of, as the above suggests -- is the best part of the story, for me. Both Harvey and Yi-Fei get to be fully developed characters who have important things to contribute to Cora's efforts to get anyone in authority to give a damn that young Asian women are being, not just verbally or physically attacked but murdered, to maybe track down the bad guy who ruined Cora's own personal life, and to deal with the Hungry Ghost that seems to be stalking her, and not just out of hunger. Because yes, the ghost stuff is far from incidental to the setting of this story. We get lots and lots of ghost action, some of it hilariously gory, some of it genuinely creepy, much of it heartbreaking. Good thing Cora has friends.

One thing I really like about horror novels like Bat Eater is how well they maintain a sense of ambiguity for as long as possible. Is this a fully supernatural tale, in which all of the adversaries, even the disease, are eldritch horrors from beyond the veil? Is the disease "natural" but the serial killer and the ghosts supernatural? Is the disease real and the serial killer just some asshole, but the ghosts are real? Or is all of this going to turn out to be aspects of Cora's psychological trauma? Baker kept me wondering and speculating about this until almost the last hour.

And all of this, to further muddy the issues, is delivered to us with a purring, cooing tenderness by narrator Natalie Naudus, who sounds like a mother telling us a weirdly contemporary bedtime story and doesn't want us to get too scared, but still relishes the disgusting details, described with immaculate syllabic precision so we can't elide or ignore them. I smelled, heard, and felt every drop of various fluids, every garbage pile, every whiff of bad breath. I'm pretty sure I showered a few more times than I needed to. I defy you not to.

Don't snooze on this one if you're in the mood for a good scare.

*I might have misspelled her name because audio book.