51 pages • 1 hour read
H. D. CarltonSatan's Affair
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Pretty Knife
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’s “pretty knife” is a pink knife her mother gave her with the explicit purpose of killing Leonard. Sibby associates the knife with both the memory of her mother and the freedom of killing her abuser to free herself and the cult members from the Saintly Baptist Church. Throughout the novel, Sibby references the knife specifically as her “pretty knife,” elevating it beyond the status of a tool, transforming it into a quasi-sacred symbol of her duty and her moral code. It is important that Sibby’s mother gave her the knife, as it quickly became a representation of Sibby’s need to protect women like her mother from tyrants like Leonard.
The pretty knife has a second symbolic value, as it also represents Sibby’s child-like nature. When Sibby drops her cotton candy, for example, she notes: “I really liked that cotton candy. It was a pretty pink color, just like my pretty pink knife and pretty pink dollhouse” (21). Though Sibby is engaged in adult acts like sex, orgies, torture, and murder, she continues to see the world as simple and innocent, corrupted only by the presence of demons within it. By removing the demons, she hopes to return the world to its proper state of innocence, just as she longs to reclaim for herself the innocence her father stole from her. The pink knife thus symbolizes both her lost innocence and the means of its restoration. In addition to killing demons to rid the world of evil, she is also protecting this worldview, in which simple pleasures like a pink treat and a pink knife are crucial to a happy environment. This mixture of childishness and violence highlights the conflict within Sibby’s character, who is both a child coping with abuse and an adult seeking vengeance.
Satan’s Affair
Satan’s Affair is a traveling, Halloween-themed fair in which Sibby takes up residence secretly, living within the walls of a haunted house. Satan’s Affair is a notable location in Haunting Adeline, as well, serving as the location of a sex scene between Zade and Adeline and the place in which Zade uncovers more about the Eternal Rebirth cult. For Sibby, Satan’s Affair is as close to a conception of home as she has ever had. Since leaving the church, Sibby seeks to replace her familiar, cult environment and behavior with places and things that are antithetical to her upbringing. As such, Satan’s Affair, for Sibby, represents a kind of moral haven, in which her surroundings are only pretending to be evil. At the Saintly Baptist Church, Leonard and the cult members pretended to be good, while perpetrating heinous abuses, so Sibby seeks out the opposite.
Satan’s Affair is also a symbol for Sibby’s internal conflict, in which she uses make-up and bravado to cover up the fact that she is essentially a frightened child struggling to overcome the abuse she faced in the cult. On the surface, Satan’s Affair, like Sibby, is terrifying, outlandish, and exciting, while, internally, both are desolate and empty, as the fair is after hours. When Zade prepares to leave Sibby, she looks out at the fair, thinking: “The same buildings and rides that are lit up with an array of colors now look as if they’ve been sitting on the muddy earth for centuries, devoid of life” (125). In this moment, Sibby is looking at both the fairgrounds and her own life, seeing how, without human contact, she is empty and “muddy.” In essence, the Saintly Baptist Church was Sibby’s identity in the negative for her entire childhood, in which she identified herself only as not belonging to the cult. Following her departure from the cult, she sought out Satan’s Affair as a positive identity—a place where she could belong and find herself, only to find that she was only masking her trauma in violence and sex.
Floral Scents and Rot
Sibby identifies a variety of scents in the novel, ranging from rotting eggs to fresh roses and daisies, and each of these scents carries their own symbolic meaning. Rotting eggs are the most direct of these symbols, as their literal, physical corruption symbolizes the moral and spiritual corruption of the demons Sibby seeks to slay. When Sibby kills a demon, she smells for that scent to know that she correctly judged the person in question. By contrast, roses, daisies, and other floral scents are intoxicating to Sibby, and they represent the purity of good. Sibby does not necessarily seek out floral scents, though, as she is usually seeking out the rotting scent of demons to kill. She notes floral scents when they are combined with the rotting scent, as this combination usually indicates a good person in danger.
Some scents combine or defy Sibby’s categorization, though, such as scents of grass, pine trees, and wilting flowers. Wilting flowers are associated with people who have been damaged by evil, even though they are not evil themselves, such as Sibby’s mother and Zade. Grass and pine trees, on the other hand, are somewhat neutral, neither good nor evil. Sarah smells like grass, which is bland and perhaps bitter, while Rosie smells of pine trees, which are often associated with cleaning products and sanitization. These scents, as such, match the personalities of the characters who smell of them, but other scents confuse Sibby further. For example, Glenda smells like poison berries, which makes Sibby think that Glenda’s sense of good and evil is like her own, with Sibby even speculating that she might smell of poison berries, too.
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By H. D. Carlton
