Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker

Kylie Lee Baker is cementing herself as one of my favorite authors and also one of my favorite writers of horror. Her novels are dark, eerie and mysterious. They are full of haunting moments, gorgeous prose and characters you can’t help but root for regardless of whatever good or bad they’ve done. In Japanese Gothic, the reader is presented with two timelines, Lee Turner living in 2026 and Sen, a samurai living at the end of the age of the samurai in Japan.

Lee was a student at NYU until he disappeared and moved back to his father’s house in Japan. Lee killed his roommate and disposed of the body and has been massively sedating himself because otherwise he thinks too much, sees too much and he just wants to exist in a state of numbness. Meanwhile, in the same house but a few hundred years earlier, Sen is trying to keep her family together. Their family is struggling to survive, food is scarce and her father’s tempers unleash danger and violence in their home.

Lee and Sen see each other across time, the house bridging their two worlds for reasons they can’t quite understand. But an unusual friendship strikes up between them, and they realize the only way to help themselves may be to help each other. But there’s more about their lives and the house connecting them to each other than they expected and it’s not long before reality is torn at the seams.

This book was so insanely good. It was dark and creepy but I could not put it down. It is such a stunning horror novel, and it was just so damn fantastic. I can’t say enough about how much I loved this one. At this point, I will just read anything Kylie Lee Baker writes. She has a forever fan of her weird stories with me, and I hope she keeps on writing them.