51 pages • 1-hour read
Satan's Affair
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Background
Series Context: H.D. Carlton’s Cat & Mouse Duet
H.D. Carlton is known for writing risky and controversial dark romance novels, the most notable of which is her Cat & Mouse Duet. Though Satan’s Affair is a spin-off of the Duet, it overlaps directly with the events of Haunting Adeline, the first novel in the series. When Adeline goes to Satan’s Affair with her friend Daya, Zade follows them and encounters Mark Williams, a senator involved in a dangerous child-trafficking cult known as Eternal Rebirth. Mark wants to kidnap Adeline for trafficking, and Zade steps in to stop him, while also finding out more about the cult. Sibby, a young woman who lives at Satan’s Affair, tries to stop Zade, thinking he is another abuser, but they end up working together to take down Mark and his associates before being split up by the police. Satan’s Affair is often listed as the first work to read in the series, but the tertiary nature of Sibby’s involvement in Haunting Adeline establishes it more as a companion work than a strict prequel or sequel.
The Cat & Mouse Duet is known for dangerous and often disturbing sexuality, which pushes the boundary of fantasy and sexual assault. Carlton’s explicit sex scenes often feature dubious consent, non-consensual sex, and sex acts that are themselves violent. For example, a notorious scene in Haunting Adeline features Zade sexually assaulting Adeline with a firearm. Satan’s Affair maintains this degree of sexual intensity, as Sibby has orgies with her five henchmen, but Satan’s Affair maintains a strict line between consensual and non-consensual sex, with Sibby consenting to sex with her henchmen and severely punishing characters who sexually assault others. Though Satan’s Affair is only truly connected to dark romance through Zade’s character and the Cat & Mouse Duet, it maintains many tropes of the genre, such as violence, murder, sexual abuse, and graphic sexuality.
Socio-Historical Context: Cults, Cult Leaders, and Abuse
Two cults form the basis of the conflict behind Haunting Adeline and Satan’s Affair, with Zade pursuing members of the Eternal Rebirth cult, while Sibby recently escaped from the Saintly Baptist Church cult. A cult is usually defined as a group oriented around a shared religious belief, which may even be derived from a more established religion. Often a single leader serves as the focal point of the cult, and the difference between a cult and any other religious group lies in the degree to which cult members are asked to cede their personal autonomy to the group—for instance, some cult members are confined to a group compound, donate all their money to the group, or sever contact with friends and family. There are many types of cults, including destructive cults, which destroy the identity of their members; doomsday cults, which focus on an apocalyptic worldview that anticipates the upcoming end of the world; and political cults, which try to effect political change based on fringe beliefs.
Some notable cults in American history include the Peoples Temple, the Manson Family, Heaven’s Gate, and the Branch Davidians. The Peoples Temple, led by Jim Jones, was a destructive cult that ended with the mass suicide/murder of its members in Jonestown, Guyana. The Manson Family is a doomsday cult most known for the Tate-LaBianca murders in Los Angeles, which were designed to start a race war that would bring about the apocalypse. Heaven’s Gate was similar to Peoples Temple in that it was founded around the idea of transcendence, which, for Heaven’s Gate, came in the form of the Hale-Bopp comet, which cult members believed was a spaceship. However, the closest cult to the Saintly Baptist Church is likely the Branch Davidians, led by David Koresh. The Branch Davidians were located in Waco, Texas, where they amassed a significant following. Koresh believed he was the Messiah, following the Christian concept of the term, and it is believed that he was guilty of sexually abusing women and children within the cult under the assumption that Koresh was inherently holy. This pattern of behavior matches closes with Leonard Dubois’s proposal that his bodily fluids were divine “nectar” in Satan’s Affair, as well as Sibby’s recollection of Dubois having sex with cult members, including children.
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