Satan's Affair

**Author:** H.D. Carlton

**Estimated Reading Time:** 18 minutes

**What This Story Explores:** A woman who has made herself into an instrument of violent justice discovers that the line between righteous fury and madness may not exist at all. It is a story about trauma, dissociation, and the terrifying comfort of believing your own delusions.

**Who This Book Is For:** Readers who can stomach graphic violence in service of a psychological character study, and those drawn to dark fiction where the narrator's grip on reality is the central mystery.

Sibel is not a hero. She is not an antihero in the romantic sense. She is a woman who kills people inside a traveling Halloween haunted house called Satan's Affair, and she believes with absolute certainty that she is doing God's work. The people she kills are sinners. She knows this because she can smell them. The pure smell like flowers. The damned smell like rotten eggs. This is not a metaphor to her. It is a fact of her senses, as real as the pink-handled knife she carries, the one her mother gave her on the night she died. The novel opens in the middle of a kill. A man writhes beneath Sibel as she plunges her knife into his chest, singing the nursery rhyme from A Nightmare on Elm Street between stabs. She pops out his eyeball. When he escapes, she lets him run, because she knows he cannot get out. Her windows are painted shut. Her exits are guarded by five costumed men she calls her henchmen. The hulking Cronus catches him in the kitchen. She finishes the kill in her bedroom, stabbing until euphoria shudders through her body. Afterward, Mortis disposes of the corpse. Timothy mops the blood and tends to Sibel intimately. This has been her ritual for five years. What makes Satan's Affair more than a splatterfest is the slow unraveling of Sibel's reality. The novel is narrated by a woman whose perception of the world has been shattered by childhood abuse so severe that her mind fractured to survive it. The henchmen who serve her, the scents that guide her, the mission that drives her, all of it may be real or may be a carefully constructed delusion. The horror of the book is not just in what Sibel does to her victims. It is in what was done to her, and in the realization that the person telling you this story cannot be trusted to know what is true. The tone is claustrophobic and intimate. Most of the action takes place inside the walls of the haunted house, in crawlspaces and hidden rooms, in the dark spaces where Sibel watches her prey through peepholes.…