Japanese Gothic

The all-new haunted house Samurai horror from Sunday Times bestselling author of Bat Eater!

By: Kylie Lee Baker

Narrated by: Natalie Naudus

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 . . .©2026 Kylie Lee Baker

Critic reviews

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)

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

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

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 Tarō to deliver a violent and thought-provoking tale of grief, generational trauma, and colonialism

So deliciously written, you'll be immediately engrossed