Hunting Adeline

Zade Meadows, or “Z,” is the deuteragonist of Haunting Adeline and Hunting Adeline. He is an imposing man, tall and scarred, and he is most known for his ability to easily intimidate even the most fearsome of criminals. He has dedicated his life to hunting down human traffickers, but Hunting Adeline forces him to use all his skills to find the woman he loves, Adeline, when she is kidnapped by the Society to draw Zade out. For the duration of Part 1, Zade undergoes a harsh transformation. Just as Adeline is forced to stifle herself to survive trafficking, Zade sacrifices his humanity, becoming increasingly violent and ostentatious in his destruction of the institutions of human trafficking. Part 2 follows Zade’s prolonged recovery alongside Adeline as he gradually comes to understand the need to limit his violence and aggression. First, he must control his sexual feelings for Adeline to avoid triggering the trauma that she has already suffered as a captive. Second, he must learn to choose his victims and refrain from violence in certain cases, as when he decides to spare Rio Sanchez at Adeline’s request.

Zade is a protector figure in the text, and the novel initially focuses on his feelings of failure and incompetence after Adeline is taken by the Society. Later, the narrative details his inner growth as he is forced to reconcile his own abuses while trying to help Adeline recover. Ultimately, Zade is a complex character who fills the role of the morally questionable dark romance love interest. In both novels, he openly acknowledges that he sexually assaulted Adeline, but he consistently backs away from any moral recognition of this action. Instead, he either justifies the act by noting that Adeline has fallen in love with him, or else he admits only in the broadest sense that he is a “bad” person. Zade’s character is ultimately riddled with contradictions. Most notably, although he desires to end all sexual violence against women, he repeatedly perpetrates sexual violence against Adeline.

Sibel, or “Sibby,” is a supporting character in Hunting Adeline, reuniting with Zade after the events at Satan’s Affair in Haunting Adeline, which are further detailed in Sibby’s spin-off novel, Satan’s Affair. Sibby grew up in a cult run by her father, Leonard Dubois, who would sexually abuse the men, women, and children living within the cult. He claimed that performing sex acts with him was an act of divinity, and only Sibby saw through the illusion he maintained over the congregation. After the death of Sibby’s mother, Sibby killed her father and ran away. Sibby is mentally scarred by her time in the cult and by her subsequent loneliness. To cope, she has created imaginary henchmen: Mortis, Jackal, Bane, Timothy, and Cronus. These figments of her imagination constitute the extent of Sibby’s social circle before she meets Zade and Adeline.

In many ways, Sibby is a source of comic relief in the novels, as she often makes wild and unpredictable comments and engages in “sex acts” with her henchmen, which in reality amount to no more than masturbation. However, Sydney, one of the captive women in Francesca’s house, proposes a darker side to Sibby’s story. Sydney explains that she is Sibby’s sister, and like Sibby, she also had to leave the cult after Leonard’s death. However, unlike Sibby, Sydney was captured and brought to Francesca’s home, where she faced the abuse of Rocco and his friends. Given the rough parallels in the women’s storylines and origins, Sydney mirrors Sibby in both personality and unpredictability, exercising a similar degree of violence but lacking Sibby’s sense of morality.

Claire Williams is the former wife of deceased senator Mark Williams, who abused Claire throughout their marriage. In Haunting Adeline, Zade decides to let Claire leave Satan’s Affair while he and Sibby kill Mark. Adeline, Sibby, and Zade all believe that Claire is a survivor of abuse, so they do not view her as a threat. However, Hunting Adeline reveals Claire’s role as a mutual partner in running the Society, and she implies that she, Mark, and another figure ran the Society together. Though Zade and Adeline struggle to understand why Claire chose to seek power by perpetuating violence and abuse, Claire becomes the main target in Zade and Adeline’s plan for revenge. In Part 1, the focus is on finding Adeline, but Part 2 centers on tracking down all the people who participated in Adeline’s capture. In the end, Claire explains her plot for world domination before Adeline and Zade kill her, revealing that she intended to institute total mind control around the world.

As the leader of the Society, Claire is the primary antagonist of the novel, and she is responsible for Adeline’s capture, which is intended to taunt and hurt Zade. Max, Luke, Rick, Rio, Francesca, and Rocco all work for the Society (a massive shadow government that controls everything in the United States). Though Claire essentially functions as an avatar of the conspiracy-style side plot of the novels, her role in Adeline’s specific trauma and Zade’s operations adds a problematic element to an already-controversial text. Her actions reflect Carlton’s decision to frame the Society as an organization that harms women specifically but is also paradoxically run by a woman. Although Haunting Adeline, Where’s Molly, Satan’s Affair, and Hunting Adeline focus on the ways in which men abuse women, Claire stands out as an exception, since she is both a survivor of abuse and a perpetrator of abuse. The final scene in which Zade and Adeline confront Claire adds insight to Claire’s character, especially when she claims that abuse is inevitable, and she merely chooses to perpetuate it in exchange for power and wealth. Her mindset suggests that power is sufficient to corrupt anyone into becoming their own worst enemy.