It was the striking blue cover and provocative blood-squirting cleaning bottle that had Bat Eater beat out the Ted Bundy biography at the local library. A decent read that leveraged Chinese folklore and mythology to create an original piece of horror, underpinned by serious matters of race, racism, identity, and belonging.
The main character finds herself in a push-and-pull dynamic within the blood and on the soil, although I came to suspect the writer may very well have been a member of the CCP propaganda department, given the overall framing of the book, and the apparent sentiment regarding the positionality of the characters, both nationally and ethnically. America came to represent weakness, intolerance, and right-wing fanaticism in the text, embodied not only in the protagonist's low self-esteem and mediocre command of Mandarin but also in her uptight Christian aunt and the killer targeting Chinese nationals. China, on the other hand, was framed as strong, beautiful, and confident, embodied in the protagonist's older, more beautiful sister and their strong, respectful Chinese aunt, who embodied traditional Chinese customs and values, customs and values barely preserved in the modern-day landscape, if memory serves.
I'm certainly not rushing to the defense of the good ol' US of A as far as this offering is concerned, but as an individual who spent the entirety of the Covid period in China, I think we need a Bat Eater book that gives voice to the huge levels of racism, intolerance, harassment, and violence on those shores, too. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, as they say, and the key takeaway should be that we all suck equally. Still, if you can gloss over the political undertones of this scrumptious bit of fiction, you're left with a pretty nifty horror tale that brings something fresh to the fore. Read it.
