Kylie Lee Baker’s critically acclaimed 2025 COVID-era serial killer ghost story, Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng was one of The New York Times’ 100 Notable Books of 2025. Hot on the heels of its success, Baker returns to the genre with a brand-new nightmare: Japanese Gothic, a time-bending, bloodcurdling tale that weaves between two timelines set nearly 150 years apart.
In October 2026, young college student Lee Turner, who cannot remember how or why he killed his roommate, flees to his father’s home in Japan. In October 1877, a samurai named Sen hides in that same house from imperial soldiers who intend to slaughter her family.
“After reading The Book of Accidents by Chuck Wendig, which is such a poignant and captivating horror novel about alternate timelines, I was so enamored with the idea of writing a dual-timeline book,” Baker told Polygon. “I’d also been tinkering with the idea of writing what I called a ‘mutual haunting’ for a while — a story that starts off like your typical haunted-house novel, but then you realize all the mysterious handprints and misplaced items and creepy shadows are happening in both timelines, and that the two characters are actually haunting each other.”
Polygon spoke to Baker about what inspired her to write Japanese Gothic, the research involved in writing about female samurai, and what kind of horror she’d like to write about in the future. After the interview, check out an excerpt from the first chapter of Japanese Gothic.
This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.
Polygon: Why 2026 and 1877 in particular?
Kylie Lee Baker: I wanted one timeline to take place in the present — that’s Lee’s timeline in 2026 — and the other to take place shortly after the Satsuma Rebellion in 1877, which was the final uprising of Japan’s samurai class against the Meiji government. That left Sen’s family sitting in the ashes of broken dreams, which I think is such a tense place to begin a story.
Was there ever a draft or concept stage where the story took place at different times in history?
I thought about setting the historical timeline before the Meiji Restoration, when the samurai still would have had social standing and power. But ultimately, I liked the idea of Sen’s family desperately clinging to the past glory of the samurai, because desperate characters do irrational things.
I also liked that because Sen’s father essentially wants to start a whole new samurai rebellion from scratch. The stakes feel much more like a personal vendetta than a political movement. I think this decision fit better with the story I was trying to tell — I’m more interested in talking about the mistakes of one family who happened to be samurai rather than commenting on the samurai at large.
While writing, did you focus on one timeline and story at a time, or work on them simultaneously?
I worked on them both simultaneously. I really wanted the stories across the different timelines to flow into each other, cutting back and forth to show the parallels between their worlds, so writing them both at once was important for setting up that juxtaposition.
You’ve written books for young readers, as well as two spine-chilling horror novels, with a third on the way. Do your writing habits differentiate depending on what genre you’re working in?
I tend to plot my adult horror novels a bit more thoroughly than my young adult novels, just because the plots of my adult novels are a bit less linear, and the style tends to be a bit more experimental. So it’s important for me to have a compass before I get too lost in all the window-dressing. Whereas with my YA books, I prefer to write the first draft as quickly as possible, then go back and revise it.
This isn’t to say I don’t try as hard with my YA books; just that I’ve learned that writing them quickly doesn’t usually lead to disaster. I tried that method for Japanese Gothic, but ended up wasting a lot of time rewriting scenes when I realized I hadn’t thought out enough of Sen’s character arc. Now, I try to think about what method is best suited for each book, rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach.
You’ve written books for young readers as well as two spine-chilling horror novels, with a third on the way. Do your writing habits differentiate depending on what genre you’re working in?
I tend to plot my adult horror novels a bit more thoroughly than my young adult novels, just because the plots of my adult novels are a bit less linear, and the style tends to be a bit more experimental. So it’s important for me to have a compass before I get too lost in all the window-dressing. Whereas with my YA books, I prefer to write the first draft as quickly as possible, then go back and revise it.
This isn’t to say I don’t try as hard with my YA books; just that I’ve learned that writing them quickly doesn’t usually lead to disaster. I tried that method for Japanese Gothic, but ended up wasting a lot of time rewriting scenes when I realized I hadn’t thought out enough of Sen’s character arc. Now, I try to think about what method is best suited for each book, rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach.
Japanese Gothic is a Gothic, of course. It’s also a ghost story, and a tale about a young samurai. What are some of your favorite stories in each of those genres, whether it’s in books, movies, or video games?
One of my favorite recent Gothic novels is House of Monstrous Women by Daphne Fama, which is like Knives Out, but in a labyrinthine house in the Philippines during the 1986 People Power Revolution. As for ghost stories, I really enjoyed She is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran, which takes place in a haunted house in Vietnam, and has one of the most unsettling ghosts I’ve ever read about.
And as for samurai, I am obsessed with the 2024 adaptation of Shōgun. I really disliked the 1980 adaptation, but it’s clear that the new adaptation was made so thoughtfully, and with so much research and respect for Japanese culture. It’s not just the story of a white man in a land of “savages” who learns that racism is bad because he loves a Japanese woman. Instead, it’s a tense Japanese political drama where the aforementioned white man has a lot to learn, and is definitely not meant to be the smartest person in the room in every single scene.
Can you tell us a bit about your research on samurai, and female samurai in particular? Did you discover anything that surprised you?
My most pressing initial research question was “What was a day in the life of a samurai like?” I needed to figure out how my samurai character would spend her time, what values would influence her choices, and how she would see herself in the world. This led me to a book called The Hagakure by Yamamoto Tsunetomo, which is often referred to as The Book of the Samurai, because it’s considered a practical guide to the samurai way of life.
And as for samurai, I am obsessed with the 2024 adaptation of Shōgun. I really disliked the 1980 adaptation, but it’s clear that the new adaptation was made so thoughtfully, and with so much research and respect for Japanese culture. It’s not just the story of a white man in a land of “savages” who learns that racism is bad because he loves a Japanese woman. Instead, it’s a tense Japanese political drama where the aforementioned white man has a lot to learn, and is definitely not meant to be the smartest person in the room in every single scene.
Can you tell us a bit about your research on samurai, and female samurai in particular? Did you discover anything that surprised you?
My most pressing initial research question was “What was a day in the life of a samurai like?” I needed to figure out how my samurai character would spend her time, what values would influence her choices, and how she would see herself in the world. This led me to a book called The Hagakure by Yamamoto Tsunetomo, which is often referred to as The Book of the Samurai, because it’s considered a practical guide to the samurai way of life.
But when I read about the author of Hagakure, I learned that he was born in a time of peace in Japan, and was grappling with what it meant to be part of a warrior class in the absence of war. The more I read, the more I found that Hagakure is just one scribe’s inherently biased perception of the samurai, and that there is no single definitive source on “how samurai lived,” because it varied so widely.
As for female samurai: there were female warriors called onna-musha who fought alongside samurai, though Sen isn’t meant to be one of them. The rise of neo-Confucianism during the Edo period established more patriarchal societal norms, and by the 1860s, women weren’t really meant to fight, though some of them did anyway! So Sen isn’t really a recognized warrior as much as she’s the result of her father compromising his beliefs in order to shape the world to his liking. Sen acknowledges that she’s only been taught to use a sword because her brothers are too young and the rebellion couldn’t wait for them to grow up.
You’ve now written a very modern haunting and a historical-fiction Gothic. Is there a subgenre of horror you’d like to try one day?
I don’t have any immediate plans for this, but I would love to try to write a found-footage horror. Paul Tremblay did this in Horror Movie by writing movie scripts into the book, which I thought was so inventive, and packed such an emotional punch. But I don’t think very much about what genre of horror I’m writing, as much as I think about what story I’m trying to tell, and how I can put a fun twist on it. I’m open to any genre that I feel like I can really sink my teeth into.
And now, here’s an exclusive excerpt from the first chapter of Japanese Gothic, in which readers are introduced to Lee and his tenuous relationship with his father. The book comes out April 14.
Chapter One
Present day
Chiran, Kagoshima Prefecture, Japan
Lee
In the house behind the sword ferns, there was a man, and a murderer, and a stain.
The house was nearly two centuries old, its walls accustomed to drinking up soot from charcoal burned through the long winters. Its tatami mats had darkened from the sting of sunlight, hiding the footprints of the last family who lived there. The cypress walls with tobacco varnish should have swallowed even the darkest stain whole, kept it safe and secret.
But there it was, all the same — a dark, narrow line, as if red wine had splashed and then dripped down, or perhaps a thin finger had smeared it like a tally mark.
Lee Turner pressed his thumb to the stain, scraped a bit of it onto his nail, then brought it to his lips and licked. He could taste the wood varnish more than anything else, but yes, that was definitely blood, in a place it shouldn’t have existed.
Bloodstains in kitchens belonged on counters and floors and sinks — places where cooking knives sliced down on fingers instead of carrots, or ungloved hands reached into a soapy sink full of sharp objects. But this stain was just above Lee’s eye level — too high for anyone to wield a cooking knife. Even worse, it marked the thin strip of wood between the oven and the open door into the corridor, far from where anyone would have prepared food.
Normally, for Lee, all the jagged puzzle pieces of the world lay tight and flat against each other. But sometimes, Lee found anomalies — like this stain — where dark chasms opened up between what he saw and what he knew to be true.
The truth was that this house hadn’t been occupied for a century, and his father had only moved in yesterday, so there shouldn’t have been any stains that Lee could still taste. And the other truth was that whatever had happened here was no accident.
Lee scraped the rest of the blood away with his thumb and watched it flake onto the tiles.
There had been so much blood in the stairwell back at school, but Lee had done a much better job at cleaning that up. His dorm had a communal cleaning closet with bleach and rags and giant trash bags. Lee had cleaned the landing and the railing and even the floor on the lowest level because he knew how far the blood had dripped. Then, once James’s body was gone, Lee had mopped the stairs just to be sure he hadn’t missed a spot. Lee Turner never would have left a stain like this behind.
Perhaps it was morbid, but Lee found it easier to picture James as a rotting corpse than as his roommate.
James had let Lee copy his astronomy homework without even asking, had brought him an extra slice of pizza when he came back from dinner with the crew team, had unlocked the door as quietly as possible when he came home drunk at 4 a.m. He was more careful around Lee than most people, as if he’d always known what Lee really was.
James had green eyes, which looked like entire planets.
James had green eyes, past tense, because Lee smashed them until they burst.
That was another anomaly, another truth that Lee still couldn’t decipher. Because he liked James’s green eyes, and he liked James, and he’d killed James, and those words didn’t make sense together, but they were still true.
There must have been a reason.
No one killed without a purpose, even if that purpose was something awful like “death excites me” or “I wanted to see how it felt.” But Lee hadn’t wanted to know the taste of James’s blood, hadn’t wanted to hold this awful feeling inside him, like the collapse of an entire star system inside his rib cage. Lee was full of dead stars and empty universes now. There was a reason, but he couldn’t remember it.
Lee reached into his left pocket, but it was empty. He’d left the bottle of Ativan in his backpack. He had a few more doses of Benadryl in the blister pack in his right pocket that he could use in a pinch, but they weren’t as effective. He hoped he could find more medicine in Kagoshima. It was very important that he did.
“Are you… sucking your thumb?” his father asked.
Lee quickly pulled his finger out of his mouth, then stuffed his hands into his pockets before turning around to face his father.
“Just biting off a hangnail,” Lee said, shrugging.
Lee’s father didn’t believe him. Even with all the sedatives in his blood, Lee wasn’t stoned enough to miss this. His father had a way of wincing at Lee like he was a sharp ray of sunlight. That was why his father never looked at him for very long — Lee would burn shapes into his eyes, then steal his sight altogether.
Lee knew the problem: He looked too much like his mother, who no longer existed — the same dark curly hair, the same eyes that were pinched a bit too close together, the same starved expression. Like a python who wanted to cram the whole world inside its jaw and eat and eat and eat, and it wouldn’t fit but he would make it fit because people like Lee and his mother were people who devoured.
Lee’s father looked more like an old silver screen star — classic American jawline, Ivy League, broad shoulders, strong nose. He’d taken Lee for a paternity test when he was a bug-eyed toddler who looked like a cursed changeling. But the test had proved that, for better or worse, Lee was his son.
Lee turned away so his father wouldn’t have to look at him anymore, then dug into the box on the counter. “Do you want coffee?” Lee said, already pulling out the hand grinder and the beans, searching the drawers for a measuring spoon.
“The day I turn down coffee is the day I die,” Lee’s father said with a smile. He walked around the counter and pulled out a drawer, then handed Lee a tablespoon and patted him too hard on the shoulder before going back to the couch.
When his father turned his back, Lee pulled out a bag of decaf from the cabinet. It was supposed to be for Hina — his dad’s girlfriend — but his father wouldn’t know the difference. Lee opened the bag of coffee beans and scooped out a spoonful, but his hand stilled before he could dump it into the grinder.
The coffee had no smell.
He shook the beans around and breathed deeper, just to be sure, but could smell nothing at all.
“It’s a Japanese brand,” his dad called from across the room, misunderstanding why Lee had frozen with his nose in the coffee bag. “It might smell different. I’m still figuring out the best one.”
“Yeah, it smells different,” Lee said quickly.
His arms worked on autopilot to scoop out the coffee beans, then he sealed the bag and stuffed it into the depths of a cabinet. And here was another anomaly — the bag was already open, so Hina had already made coffee, and if she’d thought something was wrong with it, she would have thrown it away. Lee was the only one who couldn’t smell.
Lee Turner did not have allergies, or a cold, or a deviated septum. He knew that loss of smell either meant there was something wrong with your nose, or your brain.
He ground the beans, then filled the French press with exquisite carefulness, worried his shaking hands would spill the coffee or knock the whole thing over. He flipped the hourglass timer, mumbled something about the bathroom, and slipped into the hallway, where he took another Benadryl even though it would probably put him to sleep. It was too much, too soon, but he had to drink coffee with his father, who would notice if Lee’s hands were shaking. He took a steadying breath, then turned back to the kitchen and watched the grains of sand in the hourglass fall and fall and fall.
He poured his father a cup, added cream until it was medium brown, then stirred in two spoonfuls of sugar. Lee made his own coffee exactly the same way, not because he liked it, but because he hated the taste of coffee no matter what it was mixed with, and he might as well make his father think they were alike in this one particular way.
Lee placed the two coffee cups on the table and sat exactly one cushion away from his father on the couch, close enough that the distance felt friendly, but not so close that Lee looked clingy — his father only liked affection if it was quiet.
Lee’s father took a sip and nodded in approval. “Thank you, Lee,” he said, not looking at him.
Lee made a sound of acknowledgment and sipped his own coffee, which tasted like nothing at all. Here, in the silence, Lee let himself pretend that this was enough, that this was fine, that he was the kind of person who could sit and silently drink coffee and not feel like he was trying to hold back a tsunami from spilling out of his ears, his mouth, his eyes. He would drown the world one day. He was sure of it.
From Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker. Copyright 2026 by Kylie Lee Baker, published by Hanover Square Press.
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