Satan's Affair

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion 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.

Sibby’s “pretty knife” is a pink knife her mother gave her with the explicit purpose of killing Leonard. Sibby associates the knife with both the memory of her mother and the freedom of killing her abuser to free herself and the cult members from the Saintly Baptist Church. Throughout the novel, Sibby references the knife specifically as her “pretty knife,” elevating it beyond the status of a tool, transforming it into a quasi-sacred symbol of her duty and her moral code. It is important that Sibby’s mother gave her the knife, as it quickly became a representation of Sibby’s need to protect women like her mother from tyrants like Leonard. 

The pretty knife has a second symbolic value, as it also represents Sibby’s child-like nature. When Sibby drops her cotton candy, for example, she notes: “I really liked that cotton candy. It was a pretty pink color, just like my pretty pink knife and pretty pink dollhouse” (21). Though Sibby is engaged in adult acts like sex, orgies, torture, and murder, she continues to see the world as simple and innocent, corrupted only by the presence of demons within it.