The Dain Curse

The Narrator

He arrives at the Leggetts' as a routine insurance investigator, but his flat, unhurried manner and refusal to be impressed make him a quiet pressure on everyone he questions. He is the reader's only set of eyes, and his skepticism is the engine of the book: he keeps insisting that a curse is a story people tell to cover a more tangible, jailable answer. His stubborn rationality is what Gabrielle will eventually cling to, and what the killer will underestimate.

Gabrielle Leggett

Gabrielle is the still point the whole case turns around: the daughter of a man with a buried past, engaged to Eric Collinson, and increasingly convinced that something in her blood is poisonous. She is frightened, suggestible, and self-centered in the way of the very young, which makes her exactly the kind of person a cult can harvest. Her struggle to believe she is not doomed is the emotional spine of the early and middle sections, and every man in the book seems to want something from her.

Owen Fitzstephan

Fitzstephan is the narrator's intellectual sparring partner, a man who talks about people the way a collector talks about specimens and who seems to find the Leggett mess more entertaining than it should be. He is close to Alice Leggett, was once close to Gabrielle, and has a habit of appearing with useful information just before it is needed. His friendship with the narrator is the book's most unsettling relationship, because it keeps making the reader ask why a man like that is so interested.

Eric Collinson

Collinson is the respectable, slightly stiff young man who loves Gabrielle and cannot understand what is happening to her, which makes him both sympathetic and easy to maneuver. His telegram from Quesada — urgent, secretive, insistent that Gabrielle must not know — is what drags the narrator out of San Francisco and into the second half of the book. He represents the ordinary life Gabrielle might have, and the plot keeps putting that life under threat.

Minnie Hershey

Minnie is Gabrielle's friend and shadow, loyal in a way that makes her vulnerable to anyone who speaks with enough authority. She becomes entangled in the Temple's machinery — used, dosed, and directed — and her account of what happened on the night of Riese's murder is one of the case's crucial pieces of testimony. She matters because she shows how the Haldorns operate: not by force, but by finding the faithful and pointing them at a target.

Madison Andrews

Andrews is a legal fixer whose presence at the Jeffries' place in San Mateo, where Aaronia Haldorn is staying, makes him a thread the narrator can pull. He is not a man of violence; he is a man of arrangements, and his movements suggest that someone is still trying to manage the aftermath of the Leggett deaths. His appearances keep the reader aware that the case has a paper trail as well as a body count.