Book Buzz: Japanese Gothic by Kylie Lee Baker
“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.”
― Kylie Lee Baker, Interview, Polygon
What booksellers are saying about Japanese Gothic
- Japanese Gothic is a beautifully written, atmospheric, and haunting novel blending horror, historical fiction, and mystery into one truly captivating story. I found myself sucked into both Lee and Sen’s individual POVs immediately, eager to learn about both of their lives and what brings them together…Baker is able to jump from descriptive, lyrical prose to gruesome, terrifying scenes masterfully, while at the same time, keeping you invested in two very different people and their journeys without losing momentum. I ate it up and feel like I could talk about the symbolism, the reveals, and the ending for both characters for hours.
― Sarai, Spellbound Bookstore in Sanford, Florida | BUY
- I am haunted by this story – trapped in its hazy despair, the threads of death woven through each page, the crushing weight of time and boxes and underwater graves. I am trapped in its pages, in the house behind the sword ferns. You want heavy, emotional gothic? This is it. You want unreliable narrators, spiraling depression, trauma, and deaths that echo across time? Bam. Right here. Japanese Gothic is a gorgeous blend of horror, mythology, and science fiction.
― Rachel, Friendly City Books, Columbus, Mississippi | BUY
- This book is beautiful, and sad, and I finished it in one sitting. A true Gothic tale, complete with a creepy house and ghosts literally in the walls. Baker crafts her story so well, weaving and blurring timelines together until you can’t figure out who is haunting what. And that ending – WOW. Real contender for my favorite book of 2026.
― Meagan, Righton Books, St Simons Island, Georgia | BUY
- Wow, you know a book is good when you’re left speechless. I can definitely see myself rereading this in the future just to dive into the story a bit more!
― Jordan, A Novel Romance, Louisville, Kentucky | BUY
- Japanese Gothic is a blood soaked slice of a blade too fast; a read-in-one-sitting experience that chills you to the hilt. Superb in every way.
― Dominic, Book + Bottle, St. Petersburg, Florida | BUY
About Kylie Lee Baker
Kylie Lee Baker is the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Keeper of Night duology and The Scarlet Alchemist duology. She grew up in Boston and has since lived in Atlanta, Salamanca, and Seoul. Her writing is informed by her heritage (Japanese, Chinese, and Irish), as well as her experiences living abroad as both a student and a teacher. She has a BA in creative writing and Spanish from Emory University and a master’s of library and information science degree from Simmons University.
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Queer fandom was “one of the first fault lines, I suppose you could say, of me beginning to question all the things that I had been taught,” says Sen, who came to realize that they were nonbinary through the material, which felt as eye-opening as it did illicit. “I was not supposed to be there,” Sen remembers with a laugh, “and every time my dad found out, he would block the website and I would have to go and find another one.”
There are many examples of this kind of thing throughout history. I was actually inspired by a specific historical event; I came across the true story of a village in Oxfordshire in the 1700s in which a great rumor was said to be spreading that five sisters had been “seized with frequent barking in the manner of dogs.” I was obviously fascinated to imagine how the girls’ community would have responded to their case, and how this rumor spreading might easily have become dangerous and even violent…I agree [that the] incredibly sinister aspect of Shirley Jackson’s work, the vilification of the mundane…is definitely terrain that The Hounding shares with Jackson’s stories. Like her, I’m very interested in thinking about the everyday awfulness of people, but I also wanted to try to understand even my most detestable characters. I really wanted to find a degree of sympathy for all of them in order to inhabit their thoughts and feelings.
If you talk about witches nowadays and you ask somebody to picture a witch, they’d probably say a pointy hat, a broom, a black cat. They are no longer considered malevolent.
