On the Devil’s Court is told in the first person by a teenage boy who we eventually learn is named Joseph Faust Jr. In the first paragraph, he casually identifies himself as someone who sold his soul to the devil and as the son of a brilliant genetics professor. His father moved the family from Boston—where the boy went to a private school—to Seattle, where he is a professor at the University of Washington.

The narrator portrays himself as a mediocre person for whom everything comes hard, in contrast to his father, to whom everything comes easy. He describes himself as a gangly redhead with pimples and compares himself constantly to his dad. The one thing the boy is good at and his father is not is basketball. The narrator reveals his name is “Joe.” He is a high school senior and is so much better than his father at basketball that his dad won’t play him anymore

Joe devotes Chapter 2 to his mother, Ella Frank Faust, who is a beautiful and shapely redhead. A successful artist before marrying Dr. Faust, she is a “sculptress” who has come to specialize in sculpting naked men.