Satan's Affair

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of religious discrimination, sexual violence and/or harassment, rape, mental illness, child abuse, child sexual abuse, death by suicide, substance use, graphic violence, sexual content, cursing, and physical abuse.

Sibby is a young woman in her early twenties who lives in the walls of a haunted house at the novel’s titular, Halloween-themed amusement park, Satan’s Affair. Sibby’s mother was the victim of sexual abuse by Leonard Dubois, who is Sibby’s father, and Sibby grew up in the confines of the cult led by her father, the Saintly Baptist Church. Though Sibby does not explicitly discuss Leonard’s sexual abuse of herself and his other children, she implies that all cult members were required to perform sex acts on Leonard. Sibby’s mother gifted her the “pretty knife” shortly before her death, which Sibby used to kill Leonard and escape the cult, after which Sibby took up residence in the house at Satan’s Affair, creating “friends” out of the mannequins, whom she calls her henchmen.

Sibby is the protagonist of the novel, and her narration is unreliable. She thinks she is a divine arbiter of justice, and she uses her ability to smell evil to identify and kill “demons”—people she identifies as evil.