Japanese Gothic

From Sunday Times bestselling author Kylie Lee Baker comes a wildly inventive take on the much-loved haunted house horror interwoven with Japanese mythology, where two people living centuries apart discover a door between their worlds.

2026
Lee can't remember exactly where he hid the body, but he can remember the blood. Hiding out at his father's centuries-old home in Japan, Lee knows something is wrong with him, and he knows it has something to do with his mother's disappearance almost a decade ago.

1877
A female samurai, Sen, stalks the borders of her home to protect her family from slaughter after the abolition of the samurai class. She's not sure how they'll ever survive, not without her father, who has returned from war with a different soul behind his eyes.

When Lee and Sen find one another through a door between their worlds, they're both looking for answers. But what they find in the creaking old house they share is beyond what either of them could imagine...

Review

Brilliantly inventive, sending a prickle down your spine as you struggle to distinguish between reality and delusion. A must read - I couldn't turn the pages fast enough! -- MONIKA KIM

Audacious, surreal and doggedly elusive, an elegantly mind-boggling twist on the haunted house oeuvre . . . Kylie Lee Baker blends visceral feats of bloody gore with dizzying poetry, leaving the reader as uncertain as Sen and Lee are, compelled by the power of place to stay in the house until revelation comes. An exquisite expression of human pain held tight across the centuries. -- LEIGH RADFORD

An utterly gorgeous tale of lost souls and bad fathers, Japanese Gothic is brilliant and haunting. Baker controls even her most ethereal threads with the confidence of an orchestra conductor, making every note ring true. I loved it! -- CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN

A heady puzzle box of story - the ones we are told and the ones we tell ourselves to survive. Intricate, sensuous, and haunting, the strange truth at the center of two shared mysteries unfurls in fragile, mesmerizing layers. Utterly sublime -- OLIVIE BLAKE

East meets West in this blood-slicked, unsettling and immersive tale of a double haunting... ― Daily Mail

Japanese Gothic is many things: A haunting. A mystery. A ghost story. A fairy tale. A love story. Above all, it's a compelling and heartbreaking piece of art about how parental expectations can damage us, and how love can, if not quite heal us, at least set us free -- JOHANNA VAN VEEN

A mesmerizing, beautifully crafted story that breathes new life into the haunted house genre. Ghosts dwell between every page -- MARCUS KLIEWER

An eerie and unrelenting tale of two lives, two time periods, and one singular horror soaked in blood and sorrow -- CHUCK WENDIG

An astounding tapestry of blood, time, history, and guilt: Japanese Gothic is bold and ambitious and executed with a master's touch. Pick this up. -- ANDREW JOSEPH WHITE

Intriguing, disturbing and beautifully constructed - everything I look for in a literary horror. I couldn't put Japanese Gothic down -- RACHELLE ATALLA

This book is a complete mindf*ck and I loved every minute of it -- MIA BALLARD

A breathless collision of timelines, cultures, and destinies in this impressive horror outing... In wrenching prose, Baker renders her characters both deeply flawed and profoundly human... It's as gruesome as it is un-put-downable ― Publishers Weekly

A spectacular, thought-provoking, and chilling story . . . For fans of disorienting, heartbreakingly beautiful nightmares ― Library Journal

Atmospheric and disorienting, Baker's ambitious follow-up to Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng blends historical horror with Japanese folklore, incorporating elements from the legend of Urashima Taro to deliver a violent and thought-provoking tale of grief, generational trauma, and colonialism ― Booklist

So deliciously written, you'll be immediately engrossed ― Reactor

Japanese Gothic is a rare gem of a time-slip novel, in which an NYU student hiding a terrible secret from his father crosses paths with an 1870s female samurai-raised by her own father's inflexible code-in a deliciously appealing and ancient house. Kylie Lee Baker effortlessly takes in Japanese mythology, puts her own spin on history, and weaves it all together into an incredibly tense, bloody finale. Following on from the enormous success of Bat Eater, this is, once again, an absolutely marvellous and inventive book -- ALLY WILKES

About the Author

Kylie Lee Baker is the Sunday Times bestselling author of adult horror novel Bat Eater and YA novels The Keeper of Night duology and The Scarlet Alchemist duology. She grew up in Boston, but lived in Atlanta, Salamanca and Seoul before returning to Massachusetts. Her work is informed by her heritage (Chinese, Japanese and Irish) as well as her experiences living abroad as both a student and teacher. She has a BA in Creative Writing and Spanish from Emory University and an MS in Library and Information Science from Simmons University. In her free time, she plays the cello, watches horror movies and bakes too many cookies.