Violet is the novel’s primary antagonist and a complex, round character who masterfully performs the roles of mentor, survivor, and avenger. As a legendary, Oscar-winning actress, she embodies Hollywood royalty, yet her public persona of “unfussy, unimpeachable class” conceals a deep well of trauma and a capacity for ruthless vengeance (39). Her primary motivation is to seek justice for her secret daughter, Elise Haines, whose death by suicide was a direct result of Ronan’s exploitation. This drive makes her the architect of the elaborate revenge plot, using her industry connections and acting prowess to manipulate everyone around her, including her co-conspirators and, most notably, Marin.

Violet’s actions are a study in controlled performance. She orchestrates the fake haunting on New Avalon with the precision of a director, assigning roles to the other actresses and using psychological manipulation to push Ronan to the point of crisis. Her most chilling performance is her feigned possession by Daisy Rue during the final séance. This act, designed to coerce Ronan’s confession, spirals into his murder, a shocking turn that reveals the depths of her rage and grief. Her ability to seamlessly transition from a grieving mother to a calculating killer and back to a poised public figure emphasizes the novel’s exploration of identity as a performance. After murdering Ronan, she quickly reasserts control, attempting to destroy all evidence and maintain her fabricated narrative.

Ultimately, Violet represents both the product and the perpetrator of a toxic system. She’s a victim of the industry’s patriarchal standards, having given up her daughter to protect her career from a scandal that a male star would have easily survived. This experience fuels her righteous crusade against Ronan, a man who embodies the system’s predatory nature. However, in her quest for justice, she adopts the same manipulative and exploitative tactics, using Marin’s trauma as a tool and showing little remorse for the collateral damage. Violet is a morally gray figure who achieves her goal but loses her ethical standing. The conflict is resolved when Marin learns to overcome her, forcing Violet into a permanent, silent partnership with the very woman she initially used as a pawn.

Ronan is the novel’s secondary antagonist, a charismatic and acclaimed film director who personifies the theme of Gendered Power Disparities and the Exploitation of Women in Hollywood. Publicly, he’s a handsome, brilliant artist, a “method director” who immerses his actors in their roles to achieve authenticity. Privately, he’s a serial predator who uses his position of power to seduce, secretly film, and discard young, vulnerable actresses. He’s a static and flat character; his predatory nature is an established fact at the outset of the plot, and he displays no capacity for growth or remorse. Though he’s the source of the transgressions that set the plot into action, the conflict isn’t resolved with his murder. This is why he’s only secondary to Violet as an antagonist.

Ronan’s interactions with Marin reveal his manipulative methodology. He builds a rapport by feigning interest in her past, creating an intimate and trusting environment where he can exert control. His behavior is a pattern, as he doted on Elise in the same way before destroying her life. His confession, when it finally comes, is born out of fear. Even then, he fails to take full responsibility, blaming Elise for her reaction and lamenting that his secret was exposed. His assertion that filming women without their consent was “just harmless fun” demonstrates a deep lack of empathy and a self-absorbed belief in his own impunity (316).

Ronan’s character serves as the catalyst for the entire plot. His abuse of Elise unites Violet and her friends in their quest for vengeance, and his murder is the story’s climax. Rather than a complex villain, he’s a symbol of a systemic problem. His death is presented as the extreme consequence of a system that fails to hold powerful men accountable, forcing their survivors to seek justice through extralegal and violent means.

Daisy is the novel’s central tragic figure. Introduced as the narrator of the historical narrative, Daisy’s perspective is eventually revealed to be unreliable, as she herself doesn’t realize the truth about the haunting taking place on New Avalon. One of the novel’s final plot twists is that Daisy and Azra Kovacic are actually two personalities belonging to a single, deeply traumatized young woman. Azra is the core identity, a girl who endured horrific physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her father. This sustained trauma affects her psyche, leading her to develop dissociative identity disorder. “Daisy” emerges as the dominant alternate personality, a polite and articulate young woman who’s completely unaware of Azra’s existence or the abuse she survived. Daisy’s narrative, which forms the basis of her diary, is an unconscious fabrication to make sense of a reality she can’t process; she interprets her internal struggles and emerging personalities as a supernatural haunting by an entity she names “Azra.”

Ruth Hume Semple’s journal reveals that other figures in Daisy’s diary, such as Katrina Fiske, Jonquil Collins, and Phoebe Minafer, are further manifestations of Azra’s traumatic experiences. Ruth, acting as an amateur psychologist, misdiagnoses Azra’s condition and attempts to “cure” her by eliminating her alternate personalities through hypnosis, which Azra experiences as nightmares of her friends being murdered. This misguided therapy only intensifies the internal conflict.

This psychological civil war culminates in a violent confrontation. When Ruth threatens Daisy’s existence by revealing the truth, the personality lashes out in a fugue state, reenacting the murder of her abusive father by killing Ruth. The story of Azra and Daisy drives the novel’s central tragedy, illustrating The Persistence of Trauma. It deconstructs a local ghost story, reframing it as a destructive account of abuse, mental illness, and the failure of psychological care, showing how personal trauma can become the foundation for public myth.

Ruth is a key historical figure whose journal provides the factual counternarrative to Daisy’s supernatural diary. The daughter of a wealthy and guilt-ridden arms manufacturer, she dedicates her life to amateur psychology, turning the family’s island retreat, New Avalon, into a secret haven for women experiencing severe mental illness. She’s a well-intentioned but tragically misguided figure. Motivated by watching her father’s own experience of mental illness, she seeks to help others but lacks the professional understanding to do so safely.

Her treatment of Azra is the central focus of her journal. While she correctly identifies that the “Daisy” personality is a product of trauma, she misdiagnoses Azra’s condition and employs dangerous methods like hypnosis to try to eliminate her alternate personalities and hallucinations. This interference ultimately leads to Ruth’s own murder. Her journal, hidden with her body for a century, is a critical symbol of buried truth. Its discovery by Marin completely reframes the New Avalon legend, transforming a ghost story into a psychological tragedy and reinforcing the theme of The Malleability of Truth.