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More horror!! Mwahahaha! I love it. I had Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng on my audio holds list for months. When it was finally my turn in the long queue, I completely forgot what the book was about. So much so that when someone pushes Cora's sister in front of a train in the first few pages, I gasped out loud. Had I bothered to read the description before hitting play, I would have known about this unexpected and gory event (which also makes this not a spoiler). It's in the damn description.

Cora, a young Asian-American woman, uncertain and anxious about her lack of personal identity, is tossed into the chaos of COVID in downtown New York. Cora exhibits OCD tendencies easily masked by the enhanced paranoia of the pandemic.

"I secret part of Cora likes the end of the world because it makes her strangeness feel quieter. The CDC says to wash your hands, so Cora is just being a good American by washing her hands twice."

After her sister's murder, she gets a job as a crime scene cleaner, working alongside two other young East Asian twenty-something's. As they clean up the bodies of one East Asian woman after another, Cora suspects her sister's murder wasn't a random act of violence but the beginning of a killing spree. All the while, she's visited by a ghastly apparition, a Hungry Ghost straight out of her aunt's cautionary tales. Her aunt warns her about the Hungry Ghost Festival and laying the dead to rest so they don't come back to haunt her. Cora willfully rejects her aunt's advice, simultaneously rejecting her Chinese culture and traditions.

Cora's aversion to germs has the same tenor as her aversion to her Chinese roots. She'll go through the motions with her white aunt's Christian church for a monthly allowance, but gives no credence to her Aunt Zeng's religious traditions. We can see her identity issues as they encompass every aspect of her life, from being a second-generation, mixed-race woman who feels severed from her own history to being a young woman with no personal aspirations or goals.

I love the concept and execution of Hungry Ghosts. Cora does everything she can to avoid confronting the issue. She doesn't burn the Joss paper after her sister's death, in direct contradiction to her aunt's advice. It would have cost her nothing to do, but her refusal to take part in non-western traditions makes that impossible. Then the ghost appears, terrifying and somehow obscene.

"Everyone wants Asian girls to look pretty; no one wants them to talk."

And what's worse? An Asian girl torn apart, terrifying, and doused in viscera that is not her own. Cora must confront her ghosts and solve the riddle behind the murders before she becomes the next victim.

Bat Eater is beautiful in its uncompromising devastation. Everything is on screen: the grisly murders where they always find a bat, the anti-Asian violence, and Cora's macabre flesh-eating ghost that gnaws on her coffee table at night. I cannot say it's unflinching. It is the flinch, the involuntary recoil when you step in something sticky, the shiver after an intrusive thought. Cora is a bruise.

"It's a slow and quiet drowning not to know your destination."

If you are looking for a horror book that combines people-eating ghosts with an identity crisis wrapped in a pandemic tortilla, dipped in xenophobic slur sauce, with a heaping topping of an eye for an eye, then this book is for you.

“There are worse things than leaning a little bit into the crazy parts of you.”

I feel you, Cora. Rage takes its time to coalesce in Cora, ratcheting up after every anti-Asian slur and while cleaning up the splattered remains of murdered women. It’s a slow trickle until she overflows, and she embodies the rage of all those who came before her.

If you too are on a feminine rage kick, then read this book! But Baker says it best in the afterward.

"Even in Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng, which is arguably my most depressing book to date, there are moments of brightness and laughter."

/rae/