I listened to half of this story on audiobook and the other half I read via the kindle. Thank you NetGalley!

Listening to it on audiobook was a very impactful experience. Listening to this story allowed for me to hear it through her eyes, and feel her experience that way. This also allowed for all the horror aspects to be felt as well. I loved that!

This is a brilliant story and heartbreaking at the same time. Having lived through the pandemic I can relate to elements of the story while then reading an experience I never had. She really took real and painful elements of the pandemic and society and the way it effected people and put it in a unique story.

I enjoyed this tremendously!

I love when a horror book can also make me cry

I think this will be a great book to recommend to people who are not typically horror readers, because there is so much emotion and investment in the characters, the tension is built spectacularly, and I was never, ever bored. That's not to say there's no gore/it's not scary enough; this is unarguably a horror book. But we also get glimpses into grief of many kinds, generational trauma, racism, and a 20 something just trying to make it.

This is my first horror from Kylie Lee Baker and I'm very excited to see what she'll do next in the genre.

Thank you to Netgalley and Harlequin Audio for the gifted ALC.

Wow, I don't pick up horror books often, but every time I do, they blow me away! I loved The Scarlet Alchemist, and after seeing Cora's job at the start of the book (one I shared many years ago), I decided to give this a go.

If the title didn't clue you in immediately, this book addresses the repulsive racism and anti-Asian hate crimes that skyrocketed during the beginning of COVID-19. I am not an Asian reviewer, so I urge you to check out some of the fantastic reviews by Asian and Asian American reviewers before reading mine.

This book was a roller coaster. Again, I don't read a ton of horror, so this scared the shit out of me multiple times. This book is terrifying, and not because of the supernatural elements. It's pretty gory, but not in a way that felt unnecessary or for shock value. Though, I say that, and there was a point where this book completely shocked me. Ultimately, horror is a genre that allows the reader to viscerally feel acts of horror. This book accurately depicts the violence and vile nature that racism and hatred will inflict.

The supernatural elements of this book, specifically the hungry ghosts based on Chinese Folklore, were really well done. Cora's Auntie Zeng and her sayings at the beginning of chapters were helpful in introducing us (and Cora) to the lore around hungry ghosts, while not feeling info-dumpy or telling us too much too quickly. Having Auntie Zeng juxtaposed to Auntie Lois was brilliantly done, with Auntie Lois pushing a lot of shame-based Catholicism on Cora, while Auntie Zeng provided it the knowledge to protect herself and showed up for her when she needed it.

I really loved the dynamic between the crime scene cleaners, Harvey and Yifei. While I imagine some will find the pacing during the crime scene cleaning sections a little slow, I really enjoyed all the banter. I also felt like we get to know Cora best through her relationships with her friends.

Overall, this book was excellent. Highly recommend!

Bat Eater and other names for Cora Zeng made me feel so many emotions.

It brought me back to the height of COVID, which is a time and place that many of us do not want to return to. However, if you completely ignore the existence of an event you cannot learn from the past.

And there are so many people who did not survive to look back on 2020 in 2025.

If we do not remember what so many people went through, in particularly the asian hate and racism that was rampant, there will be no action to stop it from continuing.

Outside of being hard to read emotionally, this book is particularly gory. However, this did not personally bother me and felt vital to the story that Baker is telling.

Overall, I loved so much about this book. It was very well written and had a storyline that kept hooked.

Regret towards the things that Covid took from us. Anger and despair about the horrific racism that Asians faced during Covid. Hope for the main character, Cora Zeng, as I was completely rooting for her as I watched her character evolve. These are all things that I experienced while reading this book, and I would 100% recommend it to anyone.

Thank you to Harlequin Trade Publishing and NetGalley for the E-ARC in exchange for an honest review!

I was also able to listen to the audio arc of this book from Harlequin Audio, and the narrator did a very great job. I think she brought the voice of Cora Zeng to life.

HOLY SH*T!

Adding this to my collection of books that finished me/made me lay on my kitchen floor & stare into the voice after finishing.

I am so happy to have received the audio arc, but I wish I could highlight audiobooks with my mind. Either way I am already planning to reread & annotate it. There are some profound quotes in this.

Yes, there is a heavy covid theme here, but it is heavily focused on the Asian racism that came out of covid.

The overall theme here is fear manifesting into bigotry. I know I loved this because of the social commentary mixed with horror. There are so many ugly parts to humanity, & they get progressively worse as the novel goes on. How can it get worse once your sister is decapitated from being pushed in front of train in ch1?

The Hungry Ghost lore reminds me A LOT of Junji Ito.

Natalie, as always, does a FANTASTIC job narrating.

Read for…
- Bone-chilling ghost story
- Complex family dynamics
- Covid analysis with a heavy emphasis on the Asian racism that came from it
- Hungry Ghosts
- Serial killer murder mystery
- Thought-provoking & bingeable horror

Quotes to convince you to read…
“But 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.”

“He says two words, and even though the train is rushing closer, a roaring wave about to knock them off their feet, those two words are perfectly clear, sharp as if carved into Cora’s skin. Bat eater. Cora has heard those words a lot the past two months. The end of the world began at a wet market in Wuhan, they say, with a sick bat. Cora has never once eaten a bat, but it has somehow become common knowledge that Chinese people eat bats just to start plagues.”

Thank you so much to the author, the publisher, harlequin audio, & to NetGalley for the ALC in exchange for my honest review.

Thank you Harlequin Audio for the ALC!

Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng was my second book by Kylie Lee Baker and it had the dark, horror vibe I got from her with The Keeper of Night! This story had some really heavy elements like racism, ptsd, etc. which I feel were handled with care in the midst of the dark and eerie elements like paranormal activity, murder and mystery.

The narrator, Natalie Naudus, did a great job acting this story out and brought you into it right alongside Cora as she’s wading through all this trauma.

While this story was overall good, I did have a hard time with the slow pace. Usually audiobooks help me get through slower paced books without *feeling* the slow pace, I did struggle a bit with that through this one. But overall it was really well done!

I think the concept of this story is really good and really important. The writing itself was good, however the pacing was way too slow. By 20% I’m waiting for a glimpse at the actual supernatural (based on other reviews, ghost) element to come into play. So far it’s just the horrors of racism and covid, which is fine but not hooking me into the story as part of the appeal was that there was also going to be that added layer to the story. Some more sprinkles of what’s to come or creeping about (aside from her being at a murder scene here and there) to keep me engaged would have helped.

DNF
Thank you to NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read Bat Eater And Other Names Cora Zeng! I really really really wanted to like this book but it just wasn’t the book for me, I couldn’t finish it. I liked that this book gave a glimpse of some of the racism people faced during the pandemic and the description of this book sounded so good to me and it has had so many amazing reviews on GoodReads! This book was just way too slow paced for me and there was so much unnecessary detail about every single person in Cora’s life that it felt so overwhelming and boring because it made the book move at an even slower pace. Thank you again to NetGalley.📚💕

This was so genuinely scary there were a few days I had to hit pause...but then my overwhelming need to hear the rest of Cora Zeng's story would find me again - itself a hungry ghost.

It is gory. It is multi-layered. It will make you wish you had industrial strength soap to scrub yourself with.

A must read for all horror fans!

✨ALC Review✨

I’ve never read anything like this. It’s intense and dramatic, funny and heartwarming, terrifying and gruesome. All. The. Things.

Cora Zeng lives with her older sister, Delilah, in NYC during the early days of the covid pandemic. As you can imagine, two Asian-American young women hear the most racist slurs as they’re just trying to live like everyone else. Then something horrific happens and now Cora lives alone and has a job cleaning crime scenes.

Cora is a very insular person and always has been. She let Delilah lead her and now she has to lead herself and things are hard. But she’s kind of making friends with the other two cleaners, Harvey and Yifei. As they’re cleaning, they begin to see a pattern. They’re cleaning the scenes of the murders of Asian women. They suspect there’s a serial killer targeting these women.

She’s also being haunted by a hungry ghost. I’ll let you read this book to figure out what that means if you don’t already know.

The way everything ties together is sheer artistry by @kylieleebaker.

I cannot express how important I think this book is and how traumatizing. The way the author lays bare the unrelenting racism experienced by Asians is riveting and infuriating.

🎧 The narration is exceptional as one expects from everything @natalienaudus does. Truly.

I received this ALC via #netgalley and @harlequin_audio. All thoughts are mine alone.

#bookrecs #bookreview #bookstagram #horrorfiction #horrorbooks #contemporaryfiction #bateaterandothernamesforcorazeng #kylieleebaker #audiobooks #natalienaudus

Thanks to NetGalley, the Publisher and Author for an eAudio ARC of this work in exchange for my review.

Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng by Kylie Lee Baker, narrated by Natalie Naudus, is a vivid, violent and visceral yet amazing book. Despite the intensity of heavy/dark themes such as mental illness, PTSD, violence against women, racism, injustice and discrimination, the author masterfully balances the thin edge of gore and mystery, grief and outrage, as well as culture and tragedy. I was hooked from the very beginning.

Special consideration should go to Natalie Naudus, one of my favorite narrators out there, as she brought the characters, creepy tension and emotions to life like a hungry ghost.

I will be thinking about and discussing this book for awhile.

Simply Amazing. Spooky and heart wrenching. Truley a wonderful book. The author really reflected what it was like to be of Asian dissent during COVID. I will be recommending this to EVERYONE.

I wish I could give this book a million stars!! I was hooked right from the beginning I could not listen to it fast enough! I was on the edge of my seat the entire book! The pacing was fantastic! It showed some scary truths surrounding COVID which really set the tone for the horror aspect of the story. One of my favorite reads so far this year.

Thank you to Netgalley for providing this ARC.

After a couple of years in which submissions would announce in all caps, NO COVID STORIES, we seem to have finally reached the place where we’re willing to address what was arguably the most important and traumatic historical event of the twenty-first century and a clear precursor to the current rise of fascism in the US. That much of this work is now being done in the horror genre is highly appropriate.

Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng comes at this era from a unique angle, focusing on the wave of anti-Asian sentiment (and violence) that swept the nation in 2020.

Cora Zeng’s Chinese father has already fled home, deciding that America was not quite what it had promised, and her white mother is out of the picture, part of a cult upstate, leaving Cora adrift, trying to navigate the world of New York and her extended Chinese family. Her main anchor is her half sister, Delilah, but when Delilah is killed before Cora’s eyes in an apparent hate crime, Cora begins a devastating spiral.

Months later, Cora is a crime scene cleaner, mopping up the blood and viscera of various violent crimes in New York’s Chinatown, making almost-friends with her co-workers. And then the bats begin to appear.

Showing up at multiple crime scenes, the bats lead Cora and crew to believe that a serial killer is targeting Asian people. Soon after, Cora is visited by the ghost of her sister, and things get real weird as the little Scooby Gang attempts to solve the murders (which are apparently being covered up by the authorities), as well as deal with Cora’s haunting.

The book mixes Chinese traditional beliefs in with a modern thriller plot and adds in a fair share of psychological horror to boot, and the mix should be gangbusters. Instead, Bat Eater feels a little messy. Cora’s attempts to deal with the Hungry Ghosts is compelling and, well, haunting, but the serial killer plot feels rushed, and is riddled with plot holes, resolving in a way that if satisfying, is not quite believable.

Worse, underneath all of this is the question of Cora’s mental state. Mentions of past institutionalization and oblique references to mental illness call into question just how much of this is real at all. This brand of American Psycho-style unreliable narrator is having its day right now, but it doesn’t really do much for us here. At best, it’s one piece of Cora’s characterization, but at worst it’s an answer to the aforementioned plot holes, a kind of apology for the not-quite-believable resolution that implies that none of this was strictly real anyway.

Line by line, Baker is a strong writer, and for the most part, Cora’s head is an interesting, unique place to spend time, and the novel’s conceits are unique and should work well. Unfortunately, the execution leaves a little to be desired, and that, along with characters’ penchant for speaking in dramatic monologues, keeps Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng from quite landing.

Moving. Chilling. Poignant.

This audiobook hooked me in with horrified fascination from the very first. As a Chinese woman, was chilling to hear about the covid times in this light. We so rarely discuss the overt hatred of those days.

In this book, the author wove together all those emotions and some spooky details into a perfect horror story. A young woman who watches her sister’s death ends up as a crime scene cleaner for a strange string of murders. Meanwhile, she seems to be forgetting a lot of things around the home. Little things that aren’t where they belong. It’s hauntingly beautiful in voice, and my stomach was turning over in fear and horror.

The narrator was excellent! The passionate beginning into a more detached voice after the initial trauma was impressive.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to listen to and review this book. All opinions are my own.

🦇🍽🧼Bat Eater🧼🍽🦇

Wow.

Devastatingly poetic, horrifically compelling, this book destroyed me emotionally today.

"closing your eyes doesn't stop monsters from hurting you"

I've mentioned before that Grief Horror is a new favorite genre of mine, and Kylie Lee Baker has swoon me with this beautifully written horror tragedy. From the first chapter to the very last one she captivated me over and over again. Not only does she give light to mental illness, dealing with PTSD, the loss of a loved one, and codependency but more importantly it brings forth the injustices and unfair treatment that Asians endured during the pandemic, as if going through COVID19 wasn't hard enough people had to get unfairly ostracized, discrimated and punished for things beyond their control, merely for being of Asian descent.

This (audio)book was a rollercoaster of emotions, between the horrors of humanity, to the terrors that crawl at night, to the reminder that it has been 5 years since the world changed for all of us at the same time, some more than others. Cora's nightmare came true by losing her sister, and it didn't end there, it only got significantly worse, and I am grateful I got to listen to it.

I want to also add on by praising Natalie Nautus in her narration. The way she portrayed and gave life to Cora as well as the other characters so seamlessly made this audiobook into a whole season for me. She was perfection on every single emotion, she had me on a chokehold grasping at my seat.

If you haven't yet read this one, it is a MUST for horror readers, even if you don't enjoy horror there is something you'll enjoy here.

I would love to thank NetGalley for allowing me to listen to this advanced audiobook in exchange of an honest review.

Thank you to NetGalley, Harlequin Trade Publishing, and Harlequin Audio for both an ARC and advanced audiobook in exchange for an honest review!

Hey There Delilah, What’s it like in New York City? 🏙️
It’s the end of the world and Asian women are being murdered left and right by a serial killer that leaves behind bats as a calling card.

If you loved Monika Kim’s “The Eyes are the Best Part” you’re gonna love this. The ghosts are creepy AF, the revelations are chilling and there is so much gore, whilst still maintaining a darkly funny undertone and also made me tear up at times. This is feminine rage at its finest, and the first book I’ve ever read that totally centered around the pandemic, and I think the author did a great job of capturing the fear surrounding that era. I also loved how Chinese traditions and folklore were woven throughout the chapters. The one thing I’m gonna complain about is that Cora never actually finds out the name of Delilah’s killer. I’m glad that she gets a semblance of justice in the end but the author really built up the reveal of the killer for there to not really be one. I read and listened to the book in tandem, picking up where I left off at each one. The obvious song pairing for this absolutely wild ride is Crazy Train (sorry Delilah!) by (another bat eater) Ozzy Osborne 🦇🩸🚊

Pub Date: April 28th 2025 🥳

Thank you to NetGalley and MIRA Books for advance access to this audiobook!

My thoughts:

For the first 25%, I wasn’t sure if this book was for me. The story takes place during the early months of the pandemic, so COVID is a big focus. There’s lots of masking and hand sanitizer, and I can’t say that it’s particularly fun to relive all that. However, Bat Eater looks at the pandemic through a unique lens.

The main character, Cora, is a Chinese American woman living in New York City. The racism that Cora faces in the midst of “the China virus” is heartbreaking and infuriating. Early in the pandemic, her sister is the victim of a hate crime, her assailant calling her a bat eater as he pushes her in front of a train. Months later, while working as a crime scene cleaner, Cora discovers that Asian women are being targeted by a serial killer who leaves bats behind as his calling card. Suddenly, it seems like COVID may be the least of her worries because in addition to being haunted by her sister’s murder, Cora is now being haunted by her sister’s vengeful ghost.

Early on, Cora is a difficult character to get into. The traumatic experience of seeing her sister pushed in front of a train has left her timid and paranoid, plus she’s a germaphobe in the middle of a pandemic. She’s quite the bundle of emotions, and understandably so. Cora definitely took some getting used to, but as the story progressed, I really started to like her. The secondary characters rounded her out nicely and provided some moments of humor. The hungry ghosts that haunt Cora were quite creepy and gave me a mix of Haunting of Hill House and The Grudge vibes.

By the time I was two thirds into the book, I couldn’t stop reading. The supernatural horror elements really ramped up at the end. It’s gory and gruesome and told in such a cinematic way. I would love to see this book made into a movie.

Overall, I ended up loving this book. The narrator for the audio version was fantastic, so you can’t go wrong no matter which format you choose. Definitely check this one out!

🦇🦇🦇🦇.5 /5
✔️ Highly Recommend

Yes to all. Yes to the story and yes to the voice actor. They captured the mood and pace of this book so well. I am so excited to get a copy for my home library.

This one just wasnt for me no matter how hard I tried to get into it. i don't know if it was the narrator or story itself but I had a tough time diving in,