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A review by ghostboyreads
Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng by Kylie Lee Baker
4.0
"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."
Wow, what a gorgeous and really fucking gross novel. There's such a beautiful balance to Bat Eater, between absolutely stunning writing and really intense, gory, absolutely sickening body horror, and it's all mashed together with an incredibly compelling and all too real narrative. Bat Eater is a highly affecting, deeply profound and incredibly upsetting novel, one that's at once both heartbreaking and brilliant. Lingering over each page is this inky black well of sadness and decay, it's utterly maddening, and not in the way that makes you feel as if you're losing your mind, it's maddening in the sense that it will make you angry - it's such a viscerally furious story, that it's impossible not to share in its rage. Bat Eater is simply relentless, there's never a single dull moment with this novel.
It's a real page turner, and there's just so much going on at every turn, the mystery of uncovering the crimes swirls into trying to decipher the supernatural elements of this novel, creating a kaleidoscopic nightmare that demands all of your attention and time. The story here is incredibly dark, and it's slathered in a brutally honest societal commentary, as a reader, it really does force you to take a step back and examine your own feelings. I have no particular grievance with pandemic themed novels, however, I feel that, typically when a novel uses covid as a plot device, it's because it has little else going on. Here, however, this isn't the case, while, yes, the pandemic certainly propels this story forward, it's so much more than that. Bat Eater uses the pandemic as a way to examine the ugliest and cruelest parts of humanity.
Wow, what a gorgeous and really fucking gross novel. There's such a beautiful balance to Bat Eater, between absolutely stunning writing and really intense, gory, absolutely sickening body horror, and it's all mashed together with an incredibly compelling and all too real narrative. Bat Eater is a highly affecting, deeply profound and incredibly upsetting novel, one that's at once both heartbreaking and brilliant. Lingering over each page is this inky black well of sadness and decay, it's utterly maddening, and not in the way that makes you feel as if you're losing your mind, it's maddening in the sense that it will make you angry - it's such a viscerally furious story, that it's impossible not to share in its rage. Bat Eater is simply relentless, there's never a single dull moment with this novel.
It's a real page turner, and there's just so much going on at every turn, the mystery of uncovering the crimes swirls into trying to decipher the supernatural elements of this novel, creating a kaleidoscopic nightmare that demands all of your attention and time. The story here is incredibly dark, and it's slathered in a brutally honest societal commentary, as a reader, it really does force you to take a step back and examine your own feelings. I have no particular grievance with pandemic themed novels, however, I feel that, typically when a novel uses covid as a plot device, it's because it has little else going on. Here, however, this isn't the case, while, yes, the pandemic certainly propels this story forward, it's so much more than that. Bat Eater uses the pandemic as a way to examine the ugliest and cruelest parts of humanity.
"The living think they know hunger when their stomaches spasm, when their mouths go dry, when they grow weak. But they do not even begin to understand it until they cross over into the land of death. Food will not sate the dead, but they don't realize it at first. They fill their mouths with rice, yet the hunger grows deeper, opens wider within them. They fill their mouths with bread, and the ache grows sharp, as if everything they eat is glass. Finally, they fill their mouths with blood, and at last, the pain in their stomachs grows quiet."
Bat Eater is a real blood soaked thriller, crossed with a genuinely creepy and unsettling ghost story. As haunting as it is beautiful, the story starts off incredibly strong, and only ramps things up from there. It cannot be stressed enough, how wonderfully written Bat Eater is, how disgusting yet alluring of a novel it actually is. There exist plenty of novels that offer up compelling mysteries and fantastic horror elements, but so few manage to do it with the level of elegance and care that Bat Eater achieves. Bat Eater delves deep into its exploration of grief, it's both fantastic and crushing, it's a harsh and unforgiving sort of book, entirely unwilling to shy away from any of its nastiness. Highly original and thought-provoking, Bat Eater is a cinematic, vivid and sickening horror novel that should not be missed.
"Many people think that death is the end. The ending of pain, of hate, of love. But these things are not so easy to erase. Any kind of wanting leaves a scar. The living are good at forgetting, the years smoothing out memories until all the days of their lives are nothing but rolling planes of sameness. But in Hell, it is always just yesterday that everything was lost. The dead do not forget."