Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng (2025) is a novel by Kylie Lee Baker. Set in New York City during the early months of the pandemic, the book follows Coraline “Cora” Zeng, who works as a crime-scene cleaner in Chinatown months after her sister’s murder. Baker blends elements of supernatural horror drawing on Chinese folklore with racially motivated violence and psychological trauma, as Cora and her co-workers discover numerous gruesome killings of East Asian women in the city. The novel explores The Parallels Between Supernatural Horror and Societal Violence, The Invisibility and Erasure of Marginalized Victims, and Folk Ritual as Pathway to Healing from Grief.

Baker, an American writer with Japanese, Chinese, and Irish heritage, is a Sunday Times bestselling author of dark fantasy and horror novels such as The Keeper of Night and The Scarlet Alchemist.

This study guide uses the 2025 Hodder & Stoughton Kindle edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of racism, mental illness, child abuse, child death, suicidal ideation, substance use, graphic violence, animal cruelty and death, sexual violence and harassment, cursing, and death.

Plot Summary

In April 2020, Coraline “Cora” Zeng and her half-sister, Delilah Zeng, wait for the train home in an empty subway station in New York City after they step out to buy toilet paper. Before they can board the approaching train, Delilah is pushed in front of it by a white man who calls her “bat eater.” She is decapitated by the train and dies instantly.

Months later, in August 2020, Cora is working for a crime scene clean-up service alongside two other young Chinese immigrants—Harvey Chen and Yifei Liu. The trio begin to notice that a large number of their recent cases involve East Asian women who have been murdered. Another pattern emerges when they begin to find bats at each of the crime scenes.

Cora visits her paternal aunt, Auntie Zeng, who warns her to be careful in the coming month, as it is the beginning of the “hungry ghost” festival in Chinese culture. Ghost month begins, and when Cora attends church on Sunday with her aunt, she spots a shadowy silhouette in her peripheral vision. When she attends confession, instead of her list of sins, she accidentally slips the priest a photograph of one of her recent crime scene clean-ups, involving the corpse of a gorily murdered young doctor named Yuxi He. Cora assumes Harvey slipped the photograph into her bag, as he is sometimes wont to do, and that it got mixed up with her confession sheet.

Cora begins to see spots of darkness in her vision more often and visits the optometrist out of concern, but she is declared perfectly healthy. When she gets home, she discovers that something with teeth has bitten through a table inside her locked apartment. She visits Yifei seeking reassurance that she is not losing her grip on reality, but Yifei reveals that she has encountered “hungry ghosts” herself.

Cora increasingly begins to hear voices and gets the sensation that someone is following her. Upon returning home one day from work, she discovers the figure of a “hungry ghost” in her apartment and surmises that it is Delilah based on the jade bracelet hanging off its wrist. It disappears when Cora shines a light on it. Cora begins to avoid the darkness and sleeps with the lights always on to prevent the ghost’s reappearance.

Meanwhile, the murders of East Asian women continue to rise, and a frustrated Yifei insists that they talk to the press, as no one seems to know or care about these murders. The trio meet with a reporter who is incredulous and dismissive of their claims, including Harvey’s serial killer theory and the pattern of bats being used. A frustrated Cora has an outburst; she eventually confides in Harvey and Yifei about Delilah’s death and the “hungry ghost” that is following her. Harvey and Yifei, who have both encountered such ghosts themselves, decide to help Cora. Yifei suggests attempting to retrieve Delilah’s decapitated head from the subway, as it was never found.

One of the next cases the trio works on is another East Asian murder, but the victim is a man and a police officer. While cleaning up the scene, the ghost appears and directs Cora to look under the bed, where she discovers a thumb drive that she secretly pockets. That same morning, a furious Yifei discovers that, ignoring what they told him, the reporter penned a piece on how crime has declined in Chinatown after the mayor, Mayor Webb, expanded the police force. He claims that he was prevented from reporting on what the crew told him. Later that night, the trio head to the subway station in search of Delilah’s head, but they are chased back by an unknown figure. Yifei suggests they try preparing a feast for the dead instead.

Cora tries to access the folder on the thumb drive, but she gives up when it asks for a password. The ghosts appears again when she is out grocery shopping one day and lead her to the police precinct where Officer Wang used to work. Cora pretends to be his widow and manages to gather shredded evidence that the ghosts signal to her to collect.

Harvey suggests a different approach to appeasing the ghosts, and Harvey and Cora meet at a park to try it. They end up summoning numerous “hungry ghosts” instead. The ghosts follow them back to Cora’s apartment, and Cora calls Auntie Zeng over for help. After hanging up talismans in Cora’s apartment and burning joss paper, Auntie Zeng advises Cora to wear her own jade bracelet, and she promptly obliges.

In the wake of Harvey’s failure, the trio get together at Yifei’s apartment to prepare a feast for the ghosts. While Yifei is cooking, Harvey and Cora manage to piece together the paper shreds and discover the profiles of 10 potential suspects, all white men belonging to neo-Nazi groups. Once the feast is ready and laid out, Cora begins to offer the food to the ghost. Yifei’s roommate, Paisley, and her boyfriend, Ryan, arrive and begin to eat the food. “Delilah” appears and eats Paisley and Ryan, as well as all the food, crockery, cutlery, and table linen, before disappearing again.

A few days after the feast, the trio come down with COVID and stay home, recovering. In the process, Harvey figures out who is behind the murders and calls Cora and Yifei over once they are better to tell them his discoveries. When Cora and Yifei arrive at Harvey’s uncle’s dry-cleaning service where Harvey lives, they find his murdered body inside one of the machines. Panicked, they flee the scene, and Cora suggests they drive to her Aunt Lois’s place. Yifei borrows Paisley’s car and begins to drive, revealing her own family tragedy and encounter with the supernatural on the way: Born in China with the one-child policy in action, Yifei’s younger sister was almost drowned at birth by her parents. She survived, but was eternally changed, and eventually ended up murdering Yifei’s parents when Yifei was 10. Yifei managed to trap her sister in a locked closet, effectively killing her, before escaping to the city.

A panicked Yifei accidentally crashes the car, and while Cora survives, Yifei dies on the spot. Cora manages to walk to a nearby fast-food outlet and calls Auntie Zeng, who divines that the “hungry ghost” following Cora is not Delilah after all. She arrives and picks up Cora, taking her home for safety. In Auntie Zeng’s apartment, Cora figures out the password to the thumb drive folder based on a pattern that the ghost taps out on the wall. When she opens the folder, she finds evidence of 374 women who have been murdered by numerous men, all belonging to white supremacist groups that spout anti-Asian hate and rhetoric. She also discovers that the mayor had instructed the police to cover up these murders to avoid undermining his re-election campaign. The ghost reveals itself to be Yuxi He.

Cora heads to the mayor’s house, accompanied by Yuxi He and the ghosts of the hundreds of victims, and burns it down to appease them. After the mayor’s death, a New York Times reporter receives Officer Wang’s thumb drive and runs an extensive piece on the murders and the NYPD cover-ups. Cora moves in with Auntie Zeng and takes on a new job with a deep-cleaning service instead. The book ends with Cora, months later, sitting on her bed and offering an orange to a “hungry ghost,” which is immediately snatched up and eaten.