51 pages • 1 hour read
Satan's Affair
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Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
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.
Sibel, “Sibby,” straddles a man she calls a demon, stabbing him with her favorite knife, which she got from her mother. She can smell the “evil” seeping out of the man, saying it smells like rotten eggs and confirms her judgment. Sibby orders one of her henchmen, Mortis, to hold the man down, and Sibby cuts out his eye. Mortis lets go, and the man runs out of the room into the rest of the haunted house. Sibby chases him, singing a lullaby from A Nightmare on Elm Street, and noting another henchman, Jackal, guarding a door. Sibby finds the man, who calls her crazy. Sibby hears the man encounter Cronus, another henchman, but Sibby knows her henchmen will let her enjoy the chase. Sibby orders Cronus to bring the man back to her room, where she continues to stab him until he is dead. Sibby has an orgasm, and she tells Mortis to take care of the body. Sibby’s henchmen are always in costume, fitting the aesthetic of Satan’s Affair, a travelling Halloween fair. Sibby stays in the walls during the hours of operation, and her henchmen isolate people Sibby identifies as demons. The theme of this year’s haunted house is Annie’s Playhouse, set up to look like a dollhouse. Sibby’s father thought he was doing the world a service, but Sibby sees her own vigilantism as a true service to the world.
As Mortis takes out the body, Sibby is proud that she saved the demon’s girlfriend, who smelled like roses. Timothy comes in to clean Sibby and the room, and Sibby notes that Mortis and Timothy are her favorites. While cleaning Sibby, Timothy performs oral sex on her, then Mortis returns and has sex with her. The henchmen are all dressed as demons, while Sibby has makeup on to mimic a broken doll. Sibby is not beautiful, but she does not care because she serves a function. Everyone who enters her house gets judged, and she kills anyone she deems to be evil.
Chapter 2 Summary
Sibby says Mortis is needy because his mother abandoned him. Each henchman has a similar story, such as Baine, who tries not to eat food because his father abused him. Cronus does not speak, and both Jackal and Timothy grew up among abusers in the foster care system. Sibby hates days when no one evil comes into the house, so she wants to focus without Mortis trying to caress her. Sibby does not know all the sins that rot a person’s soul, but she knows her mother was pure, and her father’s sins tainted her. Sibby’s father was the preacher of the Saintly Baptist Church who had orgies in his house, telling Sibby that his bodily fluids were God’s nectar. Sibby thinks normal people, who oppose murder and vigilantism, are weak. Her mother smelled like roses.
Sibby wanders the fair, smelling for rotten eggs that indicate a demon, and she steals a cotton candy. A girl knocks the cotton candy out of Sibby’s hand by accident, and Sibby smells her, noting that she smells like daisies. The girl and her friend insult Sibby for smelling them, and Sibby remembers her father telling her that she is sick. The girl’s friend smells like poppies, but Sibby leaves them to avoid a scene. Sibby is angry about the candy and the girls’ judgmental stares, so she goes back to the dollhouse to avoid drawing attention to herself. She also hates the idea of killing an innocent person in anger. She often attracts evil people to the house before it opens, but she spends operating hours in the walls of the house. The walls are hollow to allow maintenance, but they also make a suitable living space for Sibby once she crafts her tunnels and peepholes. Sibby admires spiders in the tunnels, wishing she could have a spider-themed haunted house.
In the walls, Sibby overhears Jennifer and Sarah, two haunted house workers, talking in the bathroom. Jennifer smells like roses, and Sarah smells like grass, which Sibby says is not evil, just unkind. Jennifer says her boyfriend might have sexually assaulted her, and Sarah pushes for more details. Jennifer says her boyfriend continued to have sex with her after she told him to stop, and he is coming to the haunted house that night. Sibby looks forward to killing the boyfriend and setting Jennifer free.
Chapter 3 Summary: “About Eighteen Years Old”
Sibby sits at dinner with her 17 siblings, and her father demands to know if she said “no” to him when he told her to gather her sisters for their nightly ritual of sexual abuse. Sibby is disappointed by her siblings, whom she says are like zombies, and she challenges her father. She knows he likes to make Sibby into an example to make the others obey, but she backs down when her father threatens her mother. Sibby knows she cannot openly doubt that God speaks to her father, since the Saintly Baptist Church is founded on her father’s status as a prophet and disciple of God. Her father stabs her hand with a fork, comparing the wound to Jesus’s crucifixion. Sibby returns to eating dinner, knowing her father wants to kill her.
That night, Sibby’s mother does not come out of her father’s room after the ritual, and Sibby notes how many new girls have been brought into the church by their parents. Sibby’s mother gave birth to her at 11 years old, and Sibby is not allowed to leave the church. Sibby worries that her father killed her mother, whom her father blamed for not raising Sibby into a more obedient daughter. Sibby says she has seen too many flowers wilt under her father’s fist.
Chapter 4 Summary
Sibby paces in the walls as groups enter and exit the haunted house, and none of them smell like demons. Sibby is anxious and wants to kill someone. Mortis interrupts Sibby, gripping her neck and pinning her against the wall. Her pacing is audible throughout the house, and Mortis wants her to calm down and focus. He uses his hand to bring Sibby to an orgasm and leaves, and Sibby assures herself they will have sex later.
After a group of 10 enters the house, which is the maximum occupancy, Sibby hears and smells one more person enter. It is Gary, Jennifer’s boyfriend, and he is clearly on drugs. Sibby confuses him with her father for a moment, feeling the familiar fear and rage she felt in her father’s presence. Gary is ugly, and Sibby speculates that Jennifer must be dating him for the thrill of being with a “bad boy.” Sibby tracks Gary through the house, singing “Ring Around the Rosie.” Jackal traps Gary in Sibby’s room, and Baine blocks the exit. On Sibby’s cue, Jackal knocks Gary unconscious, and Sibby drags him into the walls. Sibby always takes the demons herself, so the henchmen cannot be blamed.
After tying Gary to a chair and duct-taping his mouth, Sibby goes to Jennifer’s room. Jennifer crawls out from under a bed to scare the next group, but, when they leave, Sibby can see Jennifer crying. Sibby is enraged, frustrated that Jennifer does not understand that Sibby saved her. By the end of the night, Jennifer is inconsolable, and Sarah visits her. Sarah does not understand why Jennifer is upset, since she did not want to see Gary. Jennifer’s sadness and anger come from Gary not caring enough to explain himself, even if Jennifer’s intention was to break up with him. Sibby can see that Sarah, too, understands the toxic cycle Jennifer is in, and Sibby confuses Jennifer with her mother for a moment. Like her mother, Jennifer would have let Gary convince her to stay with him until her flower was completely wilted. Sibby breaks away from the wall angrily, thinking about how violent she will be with Gary that night.
Chapter 5 Summary
Gary wakes up with duct tape on his mouth, and he tries to scream. Sibby taunts him, asking about Jennifer. She wonders if Jennifer would like some art made from Gary’s blood. Sibby presses a point on Gary’s neck to knock him unconscious, then checks the empty house for stragglers. The fair is closed, but Sibby does not want to commit the sin of killing an innocent bystander. Sibby places Gary on the first floor of the house and returns to her room to wait for Gary to wake up. Sibby appreciates her knife, excited to get blood on it. Gary wakes up, screams, and fails to get past Sibby’s henchmen, who herd him toward her room. In the room, Gary charges at Sibby, who sees Gary’s black teeth and horrible smell as further evidence that he is a demon. Sibby slices one of his eyes and stabs him in the stomach. Gary collapses, and Sibby stomps on one of his ankles until it breaks, cuts the fingers off one hand, then uses a saw to cut off his other arm. Mortis praises Sibby for disabling Gary, since it means he cannot damage the house. Sibby uses a blowtorch to cauterize Gary’s wounds.
Sibby tells Gary to try to run, since she loves chasing the demons. He whines, but he gets up and hobbles around the house, looking for the exit. Sibby confronts him with Baine, guarding the side exit, and she asks Gary to admit to his crimes. Gary says he sexually assaulted Jennifer, but he did not think it was a big deal because Jennifer is his girlfriend. Sibby is infuriated, and she gets a small bat with nails in it, telling Gary that he should not mind being sexually assaulted if it is not a big deal. Sibby takes off Gary’s pants and sodomizes him with the bat, noting the stench as another sign of Gary’s evil nature. Sibby wonders how Jennifer could bear to date Gary. Baine masturbates nearby, and Gary dies when Sibby removes the bat. Sibby tells Baine to gather the henchmen.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
Protagonist Sibby is an unreliable narrator who believes she has the supernatural ability to smell someone’s soul to determine if they are good or evil. The unreliable quality of her narration is central to the novel’s exploration of The Ethics of Vigilantism, as the moral impact of her violent actions depends entirely on whether she’s right about her supernatural powers of discernment. While stabbing the first “demon” she encounters in the narrative, Sibby can smell “the evil coming out of him,” adding: “It smells like rotten egg and brimstone. It’s how I know that I made the right judgement” (1). Two key factors in Sibby’s ability are the foul smell of evil, which is later contrasted against the smells of plants and flowers, and the fact that Sibby is implicitly removed from the balance of good and evil. By making “the right judgement,” Sibby affirms her role as an arbiter between moral disparities, rather than a direct participant in the implied supernatural battle between good and evil. As people filter in and out of the haunted house, Sibby’s duty is to sniff out evil and extinguish it, not considering the morality of her own actions in violently torturing people she deems “demons."
Sibby defines her moral identity in contrast with that of her father, Leonard, who ran the cult in which Sibby grew up, but both she and her father fall prey to The Allure of Moral Certainty. Regarding her vigilantism, Sibby says: “A real service. Daddy always said he was the one doing this world a service, but he was wrong…I do my best to save it” (8). Growing up with an abusive, cult leader father, Sibby saw how he misled his followers into performing immoral acts under the guise of religious expression and salvation. Leonard believed that he was a divine figure, and his divinity justified the violence he committed against his own followers. Sibby thinks of herself as his opposite—someone whose purpose is to rid the world of men like him—but she too commits violence in the name of a supernatural calling, and she too derives sexual pleasure from violence while using a narrative of moral righteousness to justify her actions.
A complication in Sibby’s worldview is her arousal at the idea of murder and torture. She does not simply eradicate evil; she strangles, stabs, and slices the demons, all of which arouses her. Confronted with her enjoyment of torture, Sibby claims: “I’m just passionate” (4), but her passion is distinctly tied with sexual pleasure and release. After cutting out the demon’s eye and killing him, she acknowledges, “the feeling of my pretty knife cutting through flesh and bone is making my clit pulse” (7), which ultimately leads to Sibby having an orgasm on top of the dead body. Sibby’s arbiter role is not restricted to killing demons, since she also relishes her duty, continuing to mutilate the demon’s body after death and achieving sexual gratification from the act, as well. This mixture of sexual pleasure and occupational hazard calls into question Sibby’s morality, suggesting that she might be killing demons for personal enjoyment, rather than as an impartial combination of judge and executioner.
Sibby also has sex with her henchmen after killing demons, and the background on each henchman reveals The Impact of Trauma on Psychology and Sexuality. Mortis, for example, is needy because his mother “was a crack addict when pregnant with him, and when he was born, she ignored his existence” (14). Similarly, Baine, Cronus, Timothy, and Jackal have all been abused in some way, which implicitly led them to Satan’s Affair and Sibby’s service. Much like Sibby, who grew up abused and dismissed in the cult led by her father, the henchmen are in desperate need of attachment, friendship, and love. Sibby explains: “We’ve all been deprived of love and find plenty of it in each other” (14), by which she means both companionship and sexuality. The henchmen and Sibby are united in their efforts to kill off the demons who enter the haunted house, and Sibby emphasizes that they will do anything for her and she for them. These relationships, though grounded in the harsh, violent vigilantism of the novel, are likewise expressed through love and sex, mixing the henchmen’s roles between boyfriends, friends, lovers, and employees.
Sibby’s life in the fair reveals both the desperation of her situation and the impact of her upbringing. Bumping into two women, she smells them, which disturbs the women. Afterward, Sibby recalls her cotton candy “stuck in the mud,” saying: “Tears spring to my eyes and I frown deeply. I really liked that cotton candy. It was a pretty pink color, just like my pretty pink knife and pretty pink dollhouse” (21). Sibby’s understanding of the world and herself is limited to a childlike view of the fair and how she fits into it. The pink cotton candy and the “pretty pink knife” are symbols of childhood innocence, and they consume her. She is easily distracted by colors and patterns that she does or does not like. Sibby recalls how her father told her: “You’re a freak and everyone can see it. God has seen the illness in your brain and made sure everyone else can see it, too” (22), but Sibby does not appear concerned with what other people think. In fact, other people do not seem real to Sibby, as she quickly overwrites the women in her mind with the cotton candy, knife, and dollhouse, returning, mentally, to comfort and security.
Nonetheless, Sibby’s father created a lasting impact on how Sibby views others, and her memories of her mother and father come to her mind when she overhears Jennifer describe to Sarah how Gary assaulted her. For a moment, Sibby sees Jennifer as her mother, and, when Gary enters the house, Sibby realizes: “I’m no longer staring at a greasy lowlife, but Daddy. Standing before me, looking straight into my eyes as if he can see me through the wall” (39). For Sibby, all evil men become her father, and this connection to her past shatters the illusion of security that she feels behind the walls of the house. Sibby’s motivation, though shrouded in larger terms of good and evil, centers on how men abuse women, reviving her mother and father repeatedly to give Sibby another chance to save her mother. When Gary finally admits to sexually assaulting Jennifer, Sibby sexually assaults him with a small baseball bat, completing the punishment with an act proportionate to Gary’s crime. In a sense, assaulting Gary is a reversal of Leonard’s abuse, which is implied to be sexual assault against both Sibby and her mother.
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