Kylie Lee Baker returns with another addictive, gory, horror PHENOMENON
‘Brilliantly inventive. A must read – I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough’ MONIKA KIM
‘This book is a complete mindf*ck and I loved every minute of it’ MIA BALLARD
‘Audacious, surreal . . . An exquisite expression of human pain held tight across centuries’ LEIGH RADFORD
2025
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…
PRAISE FOR THE NEWEST VOICE IN HORROR:
🦇 ‘A profound reminder of the true horrors that lurk in the world’ TORI BOVALINO 🦇
🦇 ‘A serial killer mystery and a heartbreaking portrayal of grief’ KIRSTY LOGAN 🦇
🦇 ‘This book dug its claws into me and would not let go’ LING LING HUANG 🦇
🦇 ‘Body horror and female rage fiction combine in a powerful novel that will leave you quaking’ ALMA KATSU 🦇
🦇 ‘A poignant, searing portrait of the hostility and violence that plagued pandemic-era NYC’ VERONICA G. HENRY 🦇
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Reviews
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
An eerie and unrelenting tale of two lives, two time periods, and one singular horror soaked in blood and sorrow
A mesmerizing, beautifully crafted story that breathes new life into the haunted house genre. Ghosts dwell between every page
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!
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
This book is a complete mindf*ck and I loved every minute of it
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.
A spectacular, thought-provoking, and chilling story . . . For fans of disorienting, heartbreakingly beautiful nightmares
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.
Intriguing, disturbing and beautifully constructed - everything I look for in a literary horror. I couldn't put Japanese Gothic down
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