Satan’s Affair is a dark romance spin-off novel by H.D. Carlton, who is known for her intense, often controversial dark romance works. Published in 2021, Satan’s Affair is a spin-off of Carlton’s Cat & Mouse Duet series, which began with Haunting Adeline, also published in 2021. 

Satan’s Affair is loosely embedded in the dark romance genre by its connection to Haunting Adeline, but it lacks the traditional structure of two romantic leads falling in love under dark or paranormal circumstances. Instead, Sibby, the protagonist of Satan’s Affair, is in love with her henchmen: Mortis, Cronus, Baine, Timothy, and Jackal, and the primary connection to Carlton’s other works is the inclusion of graphic, explicit sexual content and violence. 

Sibby is a conventionally unreliable narrator, and she brings the reader into her world of vigilante justice following her escape from the dangerous and predatory Saintly Baptist Church cult. The novel explores themes of The Ethics of Vigilantism, The Allure of Moral Certainty, and The Impact of Trauma on Psychology and Sexuality, as Sibby slays demons to save the innocent from evil. Using her supernatural sense of smell, Sibby tracks down evil people who happen upon her haunted house at Satan’s Affair, a traveling Halloween fair. When the fair moves to Seattle, Sibby crosses paths with Zade, a professional vigilante and head of the organization Z, as he hunts down Mark Williams, a senator involved in the child trafficking cult known as Eternal Rebirth.

This guide is based on the Amazon Kindle 2021 edition of the text.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions 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.

Plot Summary

The novel opens with Sibby killing a man she calls a “demon.” She identifies a rotting smell coming from his wounds, which confirms that she made the correct judgment. However, Sibby likes to chase her victims through her haunted house, and she pursues the man until one of her henchmen, Cronus, stops him at an exit. Sibby proceeds to kill the man, continuing to stab him with her “pretty knife” until another henchman, Mortis, stops her. Sibby is proud to kill the demon because she provides a specific service to the world. By sniffing out and executing demons with the help of her henchmen, she is ridding the world of evil. Sibby is sexually aroused by the violence, though, and she has sex with two of her henchmen, Mortis and Timothy, before they clean up the crime scene.

Sibby’s henchmen are all victims of childhood trauma, including starvation, abandonment, and sexual abuse. They are all dedicated to Sibby, and the group functions as a kind of vigilante polycule, in which they all have sex and kill demons together. To Sibby, good people smell like flowers, while demons smell like rotting eggs. Sibby lives in the walls of a haunted house at Satan’s Affair, a traveling Halloween fair, and her henchmen work in the haunted house as actors. During operating hours, Sibby rarely leaves the house, waiting for a demon to enter the house for her to incapacitate and kill after hours.

When Sibby goes outside, she steals money and food, and she also searches for demons to lure into the house. From the walls of the house, Sibby can spy on the other workers, including Jennifer and Sarah. Jennifer tells Sarah that her boyfriend, Gary, sexually assaulted her, and Sarah tries to comfort Jennifer. That night, when Gary comes to visit Jennifer, Sibby hallucinates that he is her father, Leonard, and she captures Gary to protect Jennifer. When Gary does not show up, Jennifer is sad, and Sibby remembers how her mother endured Leonard’s abuse for years, adding that Sibby does not understand how women stay in abusive relationships. After hours, Sibby tortures Gary with the help of her henchmen, goading him into admitting that he assaulted Jennifer. When Gary says the sexual assault was no big deal, Sibby kills him by sexually assaulting him with a spiked bat before having sex with all of her henchmen next to his body.

Through flashbacks, Sibby recalls her experiences as a child and teenager living in the Saintly Baptist Church, the cult led by her father, Leonard Dubois. In the cult, Sibby could only rely on her mother, who was often absent for extended periods enduring Leonard’s abuse. No one was allowed to leave the church, and Sibby knew nothing of the outside world. Sibby recalls how Leonard would force all the cult members to perform sex acts for him, claiming that his bodily fluids were a divine “nectar.” Sibby was resistant to Leonard’s attempts to control her, which often led him to beat and torture both Sibby and Sibby’s mother. When Sibby’s mother was missing for days, she returned with bruises that confirmed the abuse Sibby suspected, and Sibby’s mother gave her the “pretty knife.” Sibby’s mother asked Sibby to kill Leonard, and she died by suicide that night. Afterward, Sibby stabbed Leonard to death, allowing her to flee the cult. However, Sibby felt that killing Leonard was a just act of vigilantism, which led her to her current duty of killing demons to save women from suffering the same fate as her mother.

After killing Gary, Sibby and the henchmen discuss the fair’s next location in Seattle, Washington, where they have heard of large-scale child-trafficking rings. Sibby is disgusted, and she hopes she gets the chance to kill some of the traffickers. In Seattle, Sibby hides while the fair is constructed, and she encounters an older man with his wife. Sibby can tell the wife is the victim of domestic abuse, and the older man seems to take an interest in Sibby. Sibby coaxes him into the haunted house before hiding in the walls to wait for the house to open. When the house opens, two women enter who smell like flowers, but they are followed by a large man who smells like brimstone. Sibby suspects the large man is going to attack the women, but four men, including the older man from earlier, enter after the large man, distracting Sibby.

Sibby confronts the large man in a bedroom, but he is too skilled for her to take down alone. The man reveals that his name is Zade, and they part ways. Sibby tracks him through the walls, interrupting Zade as he confronts the older man and his 3 associates. Sibby and Zade incapacitate the four men, letting the older man’s wife escape, and Sibby drags them into the walls until Zade can return. Later, Zade comes back and interrogates the older man, Mark. Mark reveals that he is a high-ranking member of a cult called Eternal Rebirth, which is responsible for child-trafficking, abuse, and ritual murder. Sibby distracts Zade by violently killing one of Mark’s associates, but they ultimately work together to extract information from Mark before killing all four men.

After the men are dismembered and loaded into Zade’s car, Sibby fantasizes about Zade joining her henchmen. Zade is Sibby’s first friend, but she understands that he has his own life. The police interrupt Zade and Sibby’s farewell, and Zade tries to get Sibby to come with him. However, Sibby refuses to leave her henchmen, and she runs back to the house. Gathering her henchmen, Sibby breaks out of the house, slashes one of the police cars’ tires, and steals another police car. After one of the henchmen crashes the car, Sibby and her henchmen are arrested.

In the Epilogue, Sibby is in a mental health hospital, where Dr. Rosie is trying to convince Sibby that she is delusional. Another patient, Glenda, believes in Sibby’s supernatural ability to detect evil, but Sibby feels exposed and alone. Dr. Rosie explains that Sibby’s henchmen were not real, and Sibby simply hallucinated their involvement based on mannequins in the haunted house and sex toys found with Sibby’s DNA on them. Sibby refuses to believe Rosie and stops taking her medication. Rosie explores Sibby’s abuse, finding that Leonard beat Sibby so severely that she has brain damage. During an interview with Rosie, Mortis reappears and convinces Sibby to kill Dr. Rosie.