So much Gothic fiction is steeped in the peculiarities of time and memory, the myriad ways each of these elements can lie to us, change us, reshape us into people we don’t recognize. It’s part of what makes the Gothic tradition within horror so rich and sumptuous, because the story you think you know is often only part of a much larger tapestry, one in which disparate threads can somehow find vibrant harmony if given enough time and care.
Kylie Lee Baker, fresh off the success of her phenomenal novel Bat-Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng, is concerned with precisely these kinds of things in Japanese Gothic, a time-hopping, vivid saga steeped in both Japanese history and modern true crime. The book earns its title within moments, and quickly sets out to weave a tale both unpredictable and inescapable, so rich with meaning and texture that you’ll get lost in it.
In present-day Japan, college student Lee Turner has fled his NYU campus life, running away from a crime he can’t quite explain or remember to hide out in the centuries-old home where his father has opted to spend his golden years. Rural, quiet, and hidden by sword ferns, the house seems like the perfect escape from the wider world, but Lee cannot so easily escape himself. Ever since the disappearance of his mother nearly a decade earlier, he’s been troubled by the depth and breadth of his own perception, so flooded with sensation that he drowns his senses out with near-constant sedation. But here in this old country house, something calls to him that he cannot ignore. Reality seems to strain here, not just flickering but sometimes opening up pathways to the past.
In 1877, Sen is a young woman living in the same house with her destitute family, training under her father to be among the last samurai Japan has to offer. Their way of life has been banned by the Imperial government, but Sen is determined to make her father and her ancestral traditions proud by carrying on the samurai way of life, fighting for it to the death if she has to. At least until the space behind her closet crackles with strange life, revealing a doorway to the future where a strange foreign spirit waits to converse with her, and reveal some truths she might wish she’d never heard.
Yes, this is a novel about a rogue samurai in 19th-century Japan and a present-day runaway college student connecting across time through a single haunted country home, and while that’s a phenomenal hook, it’s only the beginning of the ambitious, sprawling yet intimate narrative Baker seeks to weave here. In the first section of the novel, comprising roughly 80 pages, she is unhurried in her pursuit of the emotional truths behind this compelling scenario, patiently laying out the emotional landscapes through which both Lee and Sen move, and the darkness to which they’re privy.
Lee fixates not just on what he’s done that made him flee America, but on the eventual fate of his mother, which remains a mystery even after she’s been declared legally dead. Meanwhile, Sen lives in mortal peril of her own, remembering the losses her family has suffered amid the fall of the samurai and looking ahead, through her father’s own brutalist view of the world, at the death she must still face if she is to retain her honor.
What, then, does it mean when these two death-obsessed souls encounter one another? What happens to your own psyche when, to the person staring at you across time, you are nothing but a ghost, or worse, an evil spirit? These are the questions that consume Sen and Lee’s early relationship, but just as she did with Bat-Eater, Baker quickly proves that she’s just getting started.
To give away the directions in which this novel pushes its characters would be to spoil the achingly beautiful, emotionally devastating magic trick Baker’s able to pull off in these pages, but I will tell you that this feels like a book I could have read forever. I was lost in the magic, in the chemistry between these two souls looking for a way to reclaim their own stories even as they’re enrobed in the darkness of their own pasts. Kylie Lee Baker is, quite simply, one of the most important voices in modern horror, and with Japanese Gothic, she has reaffirmed her place as an essential storyteller in the genre. This is one of the best horror books of 2026, and should not be missed.
Japanese Gothic is now available wherever books are sold.
