Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng: A darkly funny, gory, and ghostly horror novel
“Because of its surface horror, this novel will send a zing of terror through the reader . . .”
Cora Zeng is a woman haunted by ghosts and a serial killer.
It starts when someone kills Cora’s half-sister Delilah, or one act may have led to the other, or perhaps it started when she became a cleaner of murder scenes.
However it came about, Cora lives in New York in the middle of the pandemic, which is a scene for death of another kind. She doesn’t really like the city.
“You can scream and the ghost of your voice will carry for blocks and blocks.”
Nevertheless, she lives there because Delilah was there, as is her American mother’s aunt and an aunt on her Chinese father’s side. Cora’s mother has left the city to live in a commune while her father returned to China to start a third family, leaving Cora with her half-sister to be tended by her aunts. One aunt pays Cora’s tuition to college and both try to raise Cora according to their particular beliefs, which Cora neither believes nor really understands but pretends to, keeping peace in the family and her tuition paid.
Currently, Cora is a crime-scene cleaner, working with Harvey and Yifei. Harvey’s uncle has the crime scene business as a sideline. He actually owns a laundry.
“Cora came for a job cleaning clothes and left with a job cleaning entrails.”
Lately, the victims of these crimes seem to follow a pattern—all young Asian women. Harvey notices this first and soon, Cora and Yifei see a formula. The deaths are bloody and bats are found in the apartments, stuffed in the shower drains, hidden in the walls. But it’s when Cora and Delilah are going home from work and a masked man pushes Delilah in front of the approaching subway that things take a turn from the macabre into the supernatural.
Delilah’s ghost appears to Cora and won’t go away.
Considering it’s the ghost month, when hungry ghosts appear needing to be fed, perhaps this isn’t so strange, but when Delilah’s ghost leads Cora to a USB thumb drive hidden in the apartment she’s cleaning, owned by the policeman investigating the murders and now himself murdered, the trio decide to do their own investigating . . . after they appease Delilah’s ghost.
The rituals seem to work—feed the ghost, and she’ll leave—but Delilah returns. It seems she wants something else from Cora, and Cora isn’t certain what that is.
She has to find out, however, but soon, other ghosts gather in Cora’s apartment, and they’re even more hungry than Delilah—and there’s still that serial killer to look out for, because it may just be that he now has Cora and the others in his sights.
One by one, the trio is being decimated until only Cora is left to face whatever is out there.
“Sometimes, the unknowing is worse than the knowing.”
The people of New York may call Cora a bat eater and blame her for bring the pandemic to them, and the ghosts may be hungry for more than the food Cora and Yifei prepare for them but Cora’s going to face it all, because that’s the way she is. She does what she has to.
This may be a story about ghosts but it’s also about one woman’s struggle to find herself in a city under a sentence of death. Surprisingly or not, not one white person in this story is kind to Cora. They either blame her personally for bringing the pandemic to their city or treat her as if she’s an ignorant half-wit who doesn’t speak English when she’s actually a college graduate who’s never been outside the US.
Both Cora, Harvey, and Yifei play along, pretending to be the ignorant foreigners they’re expected to be, simply because it’s easier, and while this might be a condemnation of those who are native-born, it’s hoped that, since this story is set in only one city, and doesn’t take into account other parts of the world, this is somewhat of an exaggeration.
This novel may be considered a horror story, because there’s certainly plenty of horror, both in Cora’s life as well as in the world around her at this particular moment; any elements of comedy in Cora’s interaction with the ghosts is definitely of the blackest hue. Nevertheless, through it all, Cora carries on, because, whatever other names there are for Cora Zeng, the one describing her best is determined.
Because of its surface horror, this novel will send a zing of terror through the reader, as well as what it says for those who neither empathize with those who are different nor see that they are doing nothing wrong by their prejudice.