BAT EATER AND OTHER NAMES FOR CORA ZENG
Author: Kylie Lee Baker
Publication Date: April 29, 2025
ISBN: 9780778368458
Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Harlequin Trade
Publishing / MIRA
Price $28.99
Buy Links:
HarperCollins: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/bat-eater-and-other-names-for-cora-zeng-kylie-lee-baker?variant=42432011436066
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Amazon: https://www.amazon.ca/s?k=9781335041791&tag=hcg-02-20
Social Links:
Author Website: https://www.kylieleebaker.com/
Instagram: \https://www.instagram.com/kylieleebaker/
X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/KylieYamashiro
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/20095503.Kylie_Lee_Baker
Book Summary:
This
unsettling adult debut from Kylie Lee Baker follows a biracial crime scene
cleaner who’s haunted by both her inner trauma and hungry ghosts as she's
entangled in a series of murders in New York City's Chinatown. Parasite meets The Only Good Indians in this sharp novel that explores harsh
social edges through the lens of the horror genre.
Cora Zeng is a crime scene cleaner in New York City’s Chinatown, washing away
the remains of brutal murders and suicides. But none of that seems so terrible
when she’s already witnessed the most horrific thing possible: in the early
months of 2020, her sister Delilah was pushed in front of a train as Cora stood
next to her. Before fleeing the scene, the murderer whispered two words: bat eater.
So the bloody messes don’t really bother Cora—she’s more bothered by the
possible germs on the subway railing, the bare hands of a stranger, the hidden
viruses in every corner. And by the strange spots in her eyes and that food
keeps going missing in her apartment. Of course, ever since Delilah was killed
in front of her, Cora can’t be sure what anxiety is real and what’s in her
head. She can barely keep herself together as it is.
She pushes away all feelings, ignoring the bite marks that appear on her coffee
table, ignoring the advice of her aunt to burn joss paper and other paper
replicas of items to send to the dead and to prepare for the Hungry Ghost
Festival, when the gates of hell open. Ignores the dread in her stomach as she
and her weird coworkers keep finding bat carcasses at their crime scene
cleanups. Ignores the scary fact that all their recent cleanups have been the
bodies of Asian women.
But as Cora will soon learn, you can’t just ignore hungry ghosts.
Author Bio:
Kylie Lee Baker is the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Keeper of Night duology, The Scarlet Alchemist duology, and the forthcoming adult horror Bat Eater. She grew up in Boston and has since lived in Atlanta, Salamanca, and Seoul. Her writing is informed by her heritage (Japanese, Chinese, and Irish), as well as her experiences living abroad as both a student and teacher. She has a BA in creative writing and Spanish from Emory University and a master of library and information science degree from Simmons University.
ONE
April
2020
East Broadway station bleeds when it rains,
water rushing down from cracks in the secret darkness of the ceiling. Someone
should probably fix that, but it’s the end of the world, and New York has
bigger problems than a soggy train station that no one should be inside of
anyway. No one takes the subway at the end of the world. No one except Cora and
Delilah Zeng.
Delilah wanders too
close to the edge of the platform and Cora grabs her arm, tugging her away from
the abyss of the tracks that unlatches its jaws, waiting. But Delilah settles
safely behind the yellow line and the darkness clenches its teeth.
Outside the wet
mouth of the station, New York is empty. The China Virus, as they call it, has
cleared the streets. News stations flash through footage of China—bodies in
garbage bags, guards and tanks protecting the city lines, sobbing doctors
waving their last goodbyes from packed trains, families who just want to
fucking live but are trapped in the plague city for the Greater Good.
On the other side
of the world, New York is so empty it echoes. You can scream and the ghost of
your voice will carry for blocks and blocks. The sound of footsteps lasts
forever, the low hum of streetlights a warm undercurrent that was always there,
waiting, but no one could hear it until now. Delilah says it’s unnerving, but
Cora likes the quiet, likes how much bigger the city feels, likes that the
little lights from people’s apartment windows are the only hint of their
existence, no one anything more than a bright little square in the sky.
What she doesn’t
like is that she can’t find any toilet paper at the end of the world.
Apparently, people
do strange things when they’re scared of dying, and one of them is hoarding
toilet paper. Cora and Delilah have been out for an hour trying to find some
and finally managed to grab a four-pack of one-ply in Chinatown, which is
better than nothing but not by much.
They had to walk in
the rain because they couldn’t get an Uber. No one wants Chinese girls in their
car, and they’re not the kind of Chinese that can afford their own car in a
city where it isn’t necessary. But now that they have the precious paper,
they’d rather not walk home in the rain and end up with a sodden mess in their
arms.
“The train isn’t
coming,” Cora says. She feels certain of this. She feels certain about a lot of
things she can’t explain, the way some people are certain that God exists. Some
thoughts just cross her mind and sink their teeth in. Besides, the screen
overhead that’s supposed to tell them when the next train arrives has said
DELAYS for the last ten minutes.
“It’s coming,”
Delilah says, checking her phone, then tucking it away when droplets from the
leaky roof splatter onto the screen. Delilah is also certain about many things,
but for different reasons. Delilah chooses the things she wants to believe,
while Cora’s thoughts are bear traps snapping closed around her ankles.
Sometimes Cora
thinks Delilah is more of a dream than a sister, a camera flash of pretty
lights in every color that you can never look at directly. She wraps herself up
in pale pink and wispy silk and flower hair clips; she wears different rings on
each finger that all have a special meaning; she is Alice in Wonderland who has
stumbled out of a rabbit hole and somehow arrived in New York from a world much
more kind and lovely than this one.
Cora hugs the
toilet paper to her chest and peers into the silent train tunnel. She can’t see
even a whisper of light from the other side. The darkness closes in like a
wall. The train cannot be coming because trains can’t break through walls.
Or maybe Cora just
doesn’t want to go home, because going home with Delilah means remembering that
there is a world outside of this leaky station.
There is their dad
in China, just a province away from the epicenter of body bags. And there is
the man who emptied his garbage over their heads from his window and called
them Chinks on the walk here. And there is the big question of What Comes Next?
Because another side effect of the end of the world is getting laid off.
Cora used to work
the front desk at the Met, which wasn’t exactly what an art history degree was
designed for and certainly didn’t justify the debt. But it was relevant enough
to her studies that for a few months it stopped shame from creeping in like
black mold and coating her lungs in her sleep. But no one needs museums at the
end of the world, so no one needs Cora.
Delilah answered
emails and scheduled photo shoots for a local fashion magazine that went
belly-up as soon as someone whispered the word pandemic, and suddenly there
were two art history majors, twenty-four and twenty-six, with work experience
in dead industries and New York City rent to pay. Now the money is gone and
there are no careers to show for it and the worst part is that they had a
chance, they had a Nai Nai who paid for half their tuition because she thought
America was for dreams. They didn’t have to wait tables or strip or sell
Adderall to pay for college but they somehow messed it up anyway, and Cora
thinks that’s worse than having no chance at all. She thinks a lot of other
things about herself too, but she lets those thoughts go quickly, snaps her
hands away from them like they’re a hot pan that will burn her skin.
Cora thinks this is
all Delilah’s fault but won’t say it out loud because that’s another one of her
thoughts that no one wants to hear. It’s a little bit her own fault as well,
for not having her own dreams. If there was anything Cora actually wanted
besides existing comfortably, she would have known what to study in college,
wouldn’t have had to chase after Delilah.
But not everyone
has dreams. Some people just are, the
way that trees and rocks and rivers are just there without a reason, the rest
of the world moving around them.
Cora thinks that
the water dripping down the wall looks oddly dark, more so than the usual
sludge of the city, and maybe it has a reddish tinge, like the city has slit
its own wrists and is dying in this empty station. But she knows better than to
say this out loud, because everything looks dirty to her, and Cora Zeng
thinking something is dirty doesn’t mean the average human agrees—at least,
that’s what everyone tells her.
“Maybe I’ll work at
a housekeeping company,” Cora says, half to herself and half to the echoing
tunnel, but Delilah answers anyway.
“You know that’s a
bad idea,” she says.
Cora shrugs.
Objectively, she understands that if you scrub yourself raw with steel wool one
singular time, no one likes it when you clean anything for the rest of your
life. But things still need to be cleaned even if Delilah doesn’t like it, and
Cora thinks there are worse things than leaning a little bit into the crazy
parts of you. Isn’t that what artists do, after all? Isn’t that the kind of
person Delilah likes? The tortured artist types who smoke indoors and paint
with their own blood and feces.
“Mama cleaned
toilets for rich white people because she had no choice,” Delilah says. “You
have a college degree and that’s what you want to do?”
Cora doesn’t answer
at first because Mama means Delilah’s
mom, so Cora doesn’t see why her thoughts on Cora’s life should matter. Cora
doesn’t have a Mama. She has a Mom, a white lady from Wisconsin who probably
hired someone else’s mama to clean her toilet.
Cora quite likes
cleaning toilets, but this is another thing she knows she shouldn’t say out
loud. Instead, she says, “What I want is to make rent this month.”
Legally, Cora’s
fairly certain they can’t be evicted during the pandemic, but she doesn’t want
to piss off their landlord, the man who sniffs their mail and saves security
camera footage of Delilah entering the building. He price-gouges them for a
crappy fourth-floor walkup in the East Village with a radiator that vomits a
gallon of brown water onto their floor in the winter and a marching band of
pipes banging in the walls, but somehow Cora doubts they’ll find anything
better without jobs.
Delilah smiles with
half her mouth, her gaze distant like Cora is telling her a fairy tale. “I’ve
been burning lemongrass for money energy,” Delilah says. “We’ll be fine.” This
is another thing Delilah just knows.
Cora hates the
smell of lemongrass. The scent coats her throat, wakes her up at night feeling
like she’s drowning in oil. But she doesn’t know if the oils are a Chinese
thing or just a Delilah thing, and she hates accidentally acting like a white
girl around Delilah. Whenever she does, Delilah gives her this look, like she’s
remembered who Cora really is, and changes the subject.
“The train is
late,” Cora says instead of acknowledging the lemongrass. “I don’t think it’s
coming.”
“It’s coming, Cee,”
Delilah says.
“I read that they
reduced service since no one’s taking the train these days,” Cora says. “What
if it doesn’t stop here anymore?”
“It’s coming,”
Delilah says. “It’s not like we have a choice except waiting here anyway.”
Cora’s mind flashes
with the image of both their skeletons standing at the station, waiting for a
train that never comes, while the world crumbles around them. They could walk—
they only live in the East Village—but Delilah is made of sugar and her makeup
melts off in the rain and her umbrella is too small and she said no, so that’s the
end of it. Delilah is not Cora’s boss, she’s not physically intimidating, and
she has no blackmail to hold over her, but Cora knows the only choice is to do
what Delilah says. When you’re drowning and someone grabs your hand, you don’t
ask them where they’re taking you.
A quiet breeze
sighs through the tunnel, a dying exhale. It blows back Delilah’s bangs and
Cora notices that Delilah has penciled in her eyebrows perfectly, even though
it’s raining and they only went out to the store to buy toilet paper. Something
about the sharp arch of her left eyebrow in particular triggers a thought that
Cora doesn’t want to think, but it bites down all the same.
Sometimes, Cora
thinks she hates her sister.
It’s strange how
hate and love can so quietly exist at the same time. They are moon phases, one
silently growing until one day all that’s left is darkness. It’s not something
that Delilah says or does, really. Cora is used to her small annoyances.
It’s that Delilah
is a daydream and standing next to her makes Cora feel real.
Cora has pores full
of sweat and oil, socks with stains on the bottom, a stomach that sloshes
audibly after she eats. Delilah is a pretty arrangement of refracted light who
doesn’t have to worry about those things. Cora wanted to be like her for a very
long time, because who doesn’t want to transcend their disgusting body and
become Delilah Zeng, incorporeal, eternal? But Cora’s not so sure anymore.
Cora peers into the
tunnel. We are going to be stuck here
forever, Cora thinks, knows.
But then the sound
begins, a rising symphony to Cora’s ears. The ground begins to rumble, puddles
shivering.
“Finally,” Delilah
says, pocketing her phone. “See? I told you.”
Cora nods because
Delilah did tell her and sometimes Delilah is right. The things Cora thinks she
knows are too often just bad dreams
bleeding into her waking hours.
Far away, the
headlights become visible in the darkness. A tiny mouth of white light.
“Cee,” Delilah
says. Her tone is too delicate, and it makes coldness curl around Cora’s heart.
Delilah tosses words out easily, dandelion parachutes carried about by the
wind. But these words have weight.
Delilah toys with
her bracelet—a jade bangle from their Auntie Zeng, the character for hope on
the gold band. Cora has a matching one, shoved in a drawer somewhere, except
the plate says love, at least that’s what Cora thinks. She’s not very good at
reading Chinese.
“I’m thinking of
going to see Dad,” Delilah says.
The mouth of light
at the end of the tunnel has expanded into a door of brilliant white, and Cora
waits because this cannot be all. Dad lives in Changsha, has lived there ever
since America became too much for him, except it’s always been too much for
Cora too and she has nowhere to run away to, her father hasn’t given her the
words she needs. Delilah has visited him twice in the last five years, so this
news isn’t enough to make Delilah’s voice sound so tight, so nervous.
“I think I might
stay there awhile,” Delilah says, looking away. “Now that I’m out of work, it
seems like a good time to get things settled before the pandemic blows over.”
Cora stares at the
side of Delilah’s head because her sister won’t meet her gaze. Cora isn’t
stupid, she knows what this is a “good time” for. Delilah started talking about
being a model in China last year. Cora doesn’t know if the odds are better in
China and she doubts Delilah knows either. All she knows is that Delilah tried
for all of three months to make a career of modeling in New York until that
dream fizzled out, smoke spiraling from it, and Delilah stopped trying because
everything is disposable to her, right down to her dreams.
Cora always thought
this particular dream would be too expensive, too logistically complicated for
Delilah to actually follow through on. Worst-case scenario, they’d plan a
three-week vacation to China that would turn into a week and a half when
Delilah lost interest and started fighting with Dad again. The idea of flying during
a pandemic feels like a death sentence, but Cora has already resigned herself
to hunting down some N95 respirators just so Delilah could give her modeling
dream an honest try.
Because even if
Delilah tends to extinguish her own dreams too fast, Cora believes in them for
all of their brief, brilliant lives. If Cora ever found a dream of her own, she
would nurture it in soft soil, measure out each drop of water, each sunbeam,
give it a chance to become. So Cora will not squash her sister’s dreams, not for
anything.
“I’ll just put my
half of the rent on my credit card until I find work,” Delilah says, “so you
won’t need a new roommate.”
Then Cora
understands, all at once, like a knife slipped between her ribs, that Delilah
isn’t inviting Cora to come with her.
Of course she
isn’t. Delilah has a mama who speaks Mandarin to her, so Delilah’s Chinese is
good enough to live in China. But Cora’s isn’t. Delilah would have to do
everything for her, go everywhere with her because she knows Cora would cry
just trying to check out at the supermarket. Delilah could do it for her, but
she doesn’t want to.
Cora suddenly feels
like a child who has wandered too far into a cave. The echoes become ghosts and
the darkness wraps in tight ribbons around your throat and you call for a mom
who will never come.
Cora’s hands shake,
fingers pressing holes into the plastic wrap of the toilet paper, her whole
body vibrating with the sheer unfairness of it all. You can’t string someone
along their whole life and then just leave them alone one day holding your
toilet paper in a soggy train station.
“Or you could stay
with your aunt?” Delilah says. “Then you wouldn’t have to worry about rent. It
would be better for both of us, I think.”
Auntie Lois, she
means. Mom’s sister, whose house smells like a magazine, who makes Cora kneel
in a confessional booth until she can name all her sins. Delilah has decided
that this is Cora’s life, and Delilah is the one who makes decisions.
Delilah keeps
talking, but Cora can’t hear her. The world rumbles as the train draws closer.
The white light is too bright now, too sharp behind Delilah, and it illuminates
her silhouette, carves her into the wet darkness. Delilah has a beautiful
silhouette, the kind that men would have painted hundreds of years ago. Cora
thinks about the Girl with a Pearl
Earring, and the Mona Lisa, and
all the beautiful women immortalized in oil paint, and wonders if they said
cruel things too, if their words had mattered at all or just the roundness of
their eyes and softness of their cheeks, if beautiful people are allowed to
break your heart and get away with it.
The man appears in
a flash of a black hoodie and blue surgical mask.
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.
Cora only glances
at the man’s face for a moment before her gaze snaps to his pale hand clamped
around Delilah’s skinny arm like a white spider, crunching the polyester of her
pink raincoat. Lots of men grab Delilah because she is the kind of girl that
men want to devour. Cora thinks the man will try to kiss Delilah, or force her
up the stairs and into a cab, or a thousand things better than what actually
happens next.
Because he doesn’t
pull her close. He pushes her away.
Delilah stumbles
over the yellow line, ankle twisting, and when she crashes down there’s no
ground to meet her, just the yawning chasm of the train tracks.
The first car hits
her face.
All at once, Cora’s
skin is scorched with something viscous and salty. Brakes scream and blue
sparks fly and the wind blasts her hair back, the liquid rushing across her
throat, under her shirt. Her first thought is that the train has splashed her
in some sort of track sludge, and for half a second that is the worst thought
in the entire world. The toilet paper falls from Cora’s arms and splashes into
a puddle when it hits the ground and There
goes the whole point of the trip, she thinks.
Delilah does not
stand up. The train is a rushing blur of silver, a solid wall of hot air and
screeching metal and Delilah is on the ground, her skirt pooling out around
her. Get up, Delilah, Cora thinks,
because train station floors are rainforests of bacteria tracked in from so
many millions of shoes, because the puddle beneath her can’t be just rainwater—it
looks oddly dark, almost black, spreading fast like a hole opening up in the
floor. Cora steps closer and it almost, almost
looks like Delilah is leaning over the ledge, peering over the lip of the
platform.
But Delilah ends
just above her shoulders.
Her throat is a
jagged line, torn flaps of skin and sharp bone and the pulsing O of her open
trachea. Blood runs unstopped from her throat, swirling together with the
rainwater of the rotting train station, and soon the whole platform is
bleeding, weeping red water into the crack between the platform and the train,
feeding the darkness. Cora is screaming, a raw sound that begins somewhere deep
inside her rib cage and tears its way up her throat and becomes a hurricane, a
knife-sharp cry, the last sound that many women ever make.
But there’s no one
to hear it because New York is a dead body, because no one rides the subway at
the end of the world. No one but Cora Zeng.
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