Wow, this book completely took me by surprise.

At its core, this book is an exploration of identity wrapped in the skin of a paranormal horror. Each escalation of the plot forces Cora into authorship of her own story. What begins as a narrative about solving murders gradually becomes a narrative about Cora claiming emotional authority over her life.

Cora is one of the most moving characters I have read in a long while. The entire novel brilliantly utilizes horror as exposure therapy for grief, fear, and identity fracture.

Cora's voice is intentionally detached. Her head is a scramble of anxiety-informed rituals and obsessions as she moves through each day in survival mode. Her thoughts circle around Delilah, not just her death, but her life, and the immense loss of identity Cora feels without Delilah (and Delilah's connection to their Chinese heritage) to form herself around.

Cora's struggle with identity is embedded into the framework of the supernatural thrill. Her anxiety and paranoia pair with cultural cosmology in a way that intentionally keeps the reader off-balance. It becomes nearly impossible to know which events are real until they turn too tangible to ignore.

Cora's grief is layered with fears of abandonment, cultural anxiety, and unresolved resentment. Set against a backdrop of increasing systemic injustice, it then transforms from personal to collective as it becomes impossible to pull apart the heartbreak of a murdered sister among so many other murdered Asian women.

The true horror at the heart of Bat Eater is societal and systemic. How times of fear and anxiety cling to an already existing system of bigotry and racism, and amplify them tenfold. How violence multiplies when it is ignored, fetishized, and quietly tolerated.

Bat Eater asks us to interrogate the reality of who gets labeled irrational in moments of collective fear. Whose voices get silenced, whose are protected, and how thin the line is between pathologizing and understanding. Using the hungry ghosts as metaphor, Lee Baker allows the reality of grief to be messy and angry, rather than pure and mournful.

The most unexpected part about Cora's journey was the tenderness underlying the narrative. I was moved to tears at how Lee Baker highlighted the importance of community, connection, and quiet joy in the journey of healing from trauma and finding one's way.

Despite so much fear, so much anxiety, so much trauma pulling the plot forward, there is a constant, soft thrum of hope as Cora starts to believe in herself, and the reader in turn begins to believe in her as well. The duality is striking and carefully controlled, something that could easily have felt messy in a less assured novel.

Bat Eater is full of blood and guts and death, but what lingers after the last page is its insistence that grief refuses to stay buried.