Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng Summary | Kylie Lee Baker
TL;DR
Kylie Lee Baker’s Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng opens in April 2020 at a near-empty East Broadway subway station.
Cora Zeng watches her sister Delilah die on the tracks after a masked man shoves her in front of a train. The novel follows Cora through a year of escalating horror in a locked-down New York City.
Her work as a crime scene cleaner places her inside apartments where Asian women have been murdered.
- Set in New York City from April 2020 to April 2021.
- A young woman is haunted after her sister is murdered in an anti-Asian attack.
- The haunting pulls her into a police cover-up involving serial killers targeting Asian women.
- Combines horror, crime-scene cleanup work, and hungry ghost folklore.
Explore: ▶ Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng Recap On Youtube
Story Snapshot
- Genre & Subgenre: Supernatural horror, paranormal mystery, psychological thriller
- Core Narrative Tropes: Hungry ghosts, pandemic isolation, sibling trauma, serial killer copycats, institutional cover-up
- Tone & Atmosphere: Claustrophobic, clinical, rain-drenched, anxious, and deeply tragic
- Primary Conflict: Cora’s struggle to survive a violent haunting while uncovering a systemic campaign of violence against Asian women
- Pacing Style: Slow-burn psychological dread building to gory supernatural violence and spiritual closure
- ISBN: 978-1335001528
- Pages: 304
- Author Background: Kylie Lee Baker writes dark fantasy and horror, often drawing from Asian folklore and history.
Characters In This Book
| Character | Role |
|---|---|
| Coraline “Cora” Zeng | A 24-year-old crime scene cleaner and art history graduate living through a haunting. |
| Delilah Zeng | Cora’s older sister who is decapitated by a train in the opening chapter. |
| Yifei Liu | Cora’s coworker who hides a past involving her abandoned sister in China. |
| Harvey Chen | A horror-movie fan and crime scene cleaner who investigates the serial killer files. |
| Auntie Zeng | Cora’s paternal aunt who maintains Chinese customs and guides her through Ghost Month. |
| Auntie Lois | Cora’s wealthy maternal aunt from Staten Island who enforces strict religious expectations. |
| Father Thomas | A minister-in-training who recruits Cora to clean the cathedral crypt. |
| Officer Kevin Wang | An NYPD officer who secretly compiled files on copycat serial killers before his death. |
| Captain Antoni Mezzasalma | The precinct captain who covers up the serial killer investigation. |
| Mayor Webb | The pro-police mayor who prioritizes reelection over murdered Asian women. |
| Yuxi He | A murdered doctor whose hungry ghost follows Cora throughout the novel. |
Explore the Entire Book Summary and Chapter Recap
Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng Summary: Full Story
Warning: Major spoilers ahead, including the ending.
The novel begins in April 2020 at the East Broadway station. Cora and Delilah are searching Chinatown for toilet paper when Delilah mentions moving to China for a modeling career.
A white man in a surgical mask calls them bat eaters and pushes Delilah onto the tracks. The train decapitates her. Police close the case without arrests.
By August, Cora works as a crime scene cleaner with Harvey Chen and Yifei Liu. Their jobs take them into apartments where young Asian women have died violently.
At one scene, Cora removes a dead bat from a clogged tub drain. At another, they find live bats trapped behind a vent. Harvey kills the bats with a skillet.
Cora sees spots of darkness moving in her vision.
An optometrist finds nothing wrong. Food disappears from her fridge. Bite marks appear on her coffee table. Yifei shows Cora a human bite mark on her ribs and says hungry ghosts are real. Cora later hallucinates duplicate priests while cleaning a cathedral crypt.
The trio sneaks onto the East Broadway tracks to find Delilah’s missing head. They find only old blood on a tunnel wall before running from footsteps in the dark. Cora’s apartment is ransacked.
Gray fingers reach out from inside her fridge. She lies to police and steals shredded files from Officer Kevin Wang’s desk.
Harvey tries to ward off jiangshi at Foley Square.
The ritual accidentally summons hundreds of hungry ghosts. That night they invade Cora’s apartment and bite her.
Desperate, Cora consults Auntie Zeng. Taping together Wang’s shredded files reveals profiles of white men tied to neo-Nazi groups.
The files show Mayor Webb and Captain Mezzasalma covered up a serial killer targeting Asian women.
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Yifei cooks a feast to appease the dead. Her roommates return and try to eat the food. The ghost decapitates and consumes them. The trio cleans the apartment and soon contracts COVID-19.
After recovery, Harvey says he knows Batman’s identity. Cora and Yifei find him drowned in a washing machine at the dry cleaner’s.
Yifei crashes their car while fleeing. She dies after confessing she left her own sister to die in China. Cora walks to a Taco Bell lot and calls Auntie Zeng. Her aunt reveals the ghost is not Delilah.
The jade bracelet says hope, not strength. Delilah’s spirit was sated long ago. The ghost belongs to Yuxi He.
Cora retrieves propane tanks from the church crypt.
She burns down Gracie Mansion as a massive joss house offering. By April 2021, the mayor is dead and Wang’s files have triggered investigations.
Cora lives with Auntie Zeng and shares orange slices with Yuxi He’s lingering spirit.
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What Drives the Story
| Theme | How the book presents it |
|---|---|
| Xenophobia and scapegoating | Chinese Americans are called bat eaters and attacked during the early pandemic. |
| Grief and sibling bonds | Cora follows Delilah’s ghost while carrying the weight of their codependent relationship. |
| Institutional corruption | The police and mayor suppress a serial killer investigation to protect their public image. |
| Trauma and compulsive cleanliness | Cora scrubs her skin raw and cleans crime scenes as a way to regain control. |
| Supernatural hunger | The hungry ghost is a literal and spiritual force representing neglected violent deaths. |
Who Should Read Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng?
Readers who like supernatural horror tied to real historical events may connect with this story.
The pandemic setting and anti-Asian violence are central to the plot.
The crime scene cleanup work adds a clinical layer of dread. The pacing is slow-burn, but the final act includes graphic supernatural violence.
This book fits readers who want horror that feels grounded in a specific time and place.
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Books Like Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng
- The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling — A claustrophobic horror novel with a isolated protagonist and psychological tension.
- Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia — Combines family secrets, supernatural decay, and social critique.
- The Hole by Hye-young Pyun — A slow-burn Korean horror novel about grief, isolation, and a controlling family.
- Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark — Uses supernatural horror to confront racial violence and historical trauma.
- Nothing but Blackened Teeth by Cassandra Khaw — A novella blending folklore, haunting, and a tight cast in a decaying house.
- The Dangers of Smoking in Bed by Mariana Enríquez — Short stories that mix body horror, ghosts, and social unrest.
Quotes from Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng
“We are moon phases, one silently growing until one day all that’s left is darkness.”
“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.”
“Nice people have the power to send Cora away if they think her mind has fractured. They’ll tie her down and tell themselves they’re doing the right thing.”
“You blast people to bits or hack them apart because you don’t see them as human—you take away the shape of their body and then no one else can see them as human either.”
“We’re sisters, so us being together is inevitable. It doesn’t matter how we feel about it. Just like it doesn’t matter how we feel about the sun setting. It happens anyway.”
“The dead do not forget.”
“I’m so fucking scared of dying, Cora. I’m the kind of person who runs and lets other people die for her, and it doesn’t matter how much they mean to me. It’s not even like my life is worth all that much.”
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