Before the Devil Breaks You characters

First appears in chapter 2

Still the Sweetheart Seer on the radio, but the novelty is wearing thin and her sponsors are nervous. She is drinking too much, reading too many objects, and covering the cost of both with performance. Underneath it she is fiercely attached to the odd family she has assembled and increasingly angry at the adults who made her what she is.

First appears in chapter 4

The vanishing pickpocket, now openly part of the group and no longer pretending his search for his mother is a side interest. His feelings for Evie are real and badly timed, and he is the one most willing to break into somewhere to get an answer.

First appears in chapter 3

The Chinatown dream walker, who can find and speak with the dead inside dreams. Since the sleeping sickness she has been drawn into the group, which she treats with the same scepticism she brings to everything, and she is the one who insists on testing what the others assume.

First appears in chapter 3

The dream walker and songwriter, back at the piano and back among the living after what the dream world nearly cost him. Loyal to Theta above everyone, he is trying to build an ordinary life alongside a gift that keeps refusing to stay ordinary.

First appears in chapter 5

A Follies star who can call fire, in a relationship with Memphis that they still keep hidden. Her control over the fire is poor and getting worse under strain, and the husband she left in Kansas is the fear she has never stopped carrying.

First appears in chapter 5

The Harlem healer and poet, in love with Theta, writing seriously, and learning that his gift has limits and a price. He is protective of Isaiah to the point of stifling him, and worried by how far his brother's visions now reach.

First appears in chapter 5

Memphis's younger brother, recovered from the coma and stronger than before. His visions now arrive unbidden and show him things far outside Harlem, and he is tired of being told he is too young to be of use.

First appears in chapter 4

Will's assistant, still dependent on the serum that keeps him alive and unnaturally strong, and increasingly aware of who manufactures it and what that gives them over him. Rigid, honest, and unhappy, he is at the point where the treatment starts to feel like a leash.

First appears in chapter 4

Evie's oldest friend, done with waiting for a life of her own. Raised by campaigners and always cast as the sensible one, she is looking for work that matters and for people who take her seriously, and she has begun spending time with a circle of political radicals who do.

First appears in chapter 3

Evie's uncle, keeper of the museum and of a great deal he has never told her. He knows what the rising dead mean and he knows his own part in bringing the situation about, and he keeps choosing, day by day, not to say so.

Also known as Margaret Walker

First appears in chapter 16

Will's former colleague, who ran the wartime Diviner programme alongside him and has spent the years since trying to keep track of the children it produced. Careful and unsentimental, she is readier than Will to tell the young people the truth.

Also known as Guillaume Johnson

First appears in chapter 15

The blind singer who drained Isaiah Campbell nearly to death and has been living with it since. His real name is Guillaume Johnson, and he was himself a subject of the wartime programme: it took his sight and left him able to pull the gift out of other Diviners. He is trying to be useful to the family he damaged.

First appears in chapter 6

America's most famous inventor and industrialist, building an exhibition to show the country its scientific future. He funded the wartime programme that made the Diviners, denies in public that Diviners exist, and treats anything he cannot control as a problem of engineering.

First appears in chapter 30

The figure in the tall stovepipe hat who has been at the edges of the Diviners' dreams since the beginning: courteous, amused, attended by crows, and able to reach the dead and set them walking. He does not force anyone. He offers bargains and waits for people to accept them.

First appears in chapter 11

A small boy shut up in the asylum on Ward's Island because of the visions he cannot stop having. He sees what is coming rather than what is, which has made him useless to his keepers and frightening to everyone else, and he recognises the Diviners for what they are as soon as he meets them.

First appears in chapter 8

An elderly resident of the Bennington who lays salt at the thresholds and is written off by her neighbours as senile. She is neither: she knows what walks at night, she has fought it before, and she has been waiting a very long time for someone to ask her about it.