Review by Booklist Review
In April 2020, in New York City, 24-year-old Chinese American woman Cora Zeng looks on in horror as her sister Delilah is violently pushed off a subway platform, the masked killer shouting "Bat eater!" before he flees. Months later, Delilah's killer remains at large, and a traumatized Cora, now working as a crime-scene cleaner in Chinatown, ignores her Auntie Zeng's repeated directives to burn joss paper for Delilah in the afterlife. When a possible serial killer begins targeting East Asian women and leaving bat carcasses at the crime scenes, Cora wonders if there's any connection to her sister's murder. Meanwhile, her food keeps disappearing and her coffee table is riddled with bite marks. Has Delilah's hungry ghost returned, seeking tribute? As she digs deeper to get to the truth, Cora must summon up the strength to finally confront her trauma and rage head-on if she wants to survive. YA author Kylie Lee Baker's (The Scarlet Alchemist) blood-soaked, Chinese folklore--inspired adult debut deftly explores weighty themes of grief, mental illness, collective memory, and Sinophobia (particularly its rise during the COVID-19 pandemic), building as she does to a pulse-pounding finale that will linger long after readers have turned the final page. Essential reading from a new voice in horror.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
YA author Baker (The Scarlet Alchemist) puts a supernatural twist on the early days of Covid in her searing adult debut. Cora Zeng is an underemployed art history major-turned New York City crime scene cleaner, eking out a living scrubbing bodies off the walls. In early 2020, she's disconcerted to notice an uptick in murdered Asian women. Cora, who is mixed-race, does not believe in either Asian ghost stories or Western religion and always does what her aunties tell her to do--otherwise they might place her back in the psychiatric unit. Then her half sister, Delilah, is murdered in a hate crime, and Cora thinks she sees Delilah's ghost in their shared apartment. As the Hungry Ghost Festival approaches, she starts seeing more and more restless spirits. She confesses these visions to her fellow cleaners, Harvey and Yifei, who help her hatch a plan to hold a feast for the ghosts, even as people around them are picked off one by one. Baker successfully uses fear, both supernatural and human, to shine a spotlight on anti-Asian hate. Fans of creepy ghost stories and social horror will want to snap this up. Agent: Mary C. Moore, Kimberley Cameron & Assoc. (Jan.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
