The opening pages take place nowhere near Washington. In northern Iraq, at the end of a long season of digging, an elderly man in khaki sits outside a roadside teahouse and cannot shake a premonition. Back at the museum in Mosul, the curator watches him turn a small pierced amulet over and over in his hand, the head of an ancient wind demon worn as protection by someone long dead. That evening the old man walks alone through the ruins, stops in front of a winged statue, and feels a cold breeze rise at sunset. The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty opens with a premonition rather than a fright, and the book is wiser for it.
A House With Two Kinds of Silence
Then the story moves to a rented brick house in Georgetown, and to Chris MacNeil, a famous actress with a tousled red crop, a gift for swearing and no belief in anything beyond the grave. The novel likes her enormously. She fights her director over the script, teases her stiff Swiss houseman, and dotes on her daughter Regan, a shy eleven-year-old who leaves a rose on her mother’s breakfast plate. Early on, Chris wakes from a dream about not existing, a terror so physical that she carries it all day. Years before, she lost a small son to a bad prescription, and she has trusted doctors very little since.
That is the private silence the book is built on. The other one is God’s. When Regan’s behaviour begins to change, Chris has nothing to turn to except medicine, and The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty follows her through a long parade of specialists with real sympathy for a parent being told, again and again, that the tests are normal. The supernatural creeps in slowly, so slowly that readers who know only the film’s reputation may be surprised by how much of the book is an anxious mother on the telephone.
The Priest William Peter Blatty Understood
Damien Karras enters on a subway platform, trying not to be seen by a drunk who will ask him for money, and failing, and helping anyway. He is a Jesuit psychiatrist who counsels other priests, and he has decided he no longer believes. His mother lives alone in a New York tenement with a radio for company, and he cannot forgive himself for leaving her there. The novel treats that guilt with great tact. When the radio becomes the detail that tells the neighbours something is wrong, it is one of the saddest sentences in American horror.
Karras is the reason The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty outlives its imitators. He is not a hero who finds his courage. He is a clever, tired man who suspects that faith is a kind of love, and who has been hurt too badly to risk loving again. The demon, when it comes to know him, aims straight at that wound.
Laughter in a Frightened Book
The great surprise is how funny the novel is. Chris’s director, a gin-soaked Englishman who chews strips of script when he is nervous, gets the best insults. Father Dyer, a small, pink-faced Jesuit with a deadpan routine and a habit of stealing Scotch for a grieving friend, would steal any book he wandered into. Even Karl, the houseman everyone finds sinister, turns out to be carrying something quieter and sadder than menace, in a subplot the novel resolves with surprising gentleness. These people make the horror matter, because the reader wants them all to be all right. A lesser writer would have cleared the stage for the demon. The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty keeps the household talking, bickering and making coffee, and the ordinary noise makes the silences upstairs far worse.
The faults of The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty are bound up with its virtues. Blatty is so determined to give scepticism a fair hearing that the long stretch before the rite circles the same ground repeatedly, with every hopeful sign followed by a deflating explanation, until the doubt starts to feel like delay. The sexual obscenity the demon pours through a child is meant to make evil disgusting rather than glamorous, and it succeeds, but the sheer quantity dulls its force. The prose, too, can swell into purple when a plain sentence would serve. None of it is fatal. All of it is noticeable.
Readers should know what they are getting into: the book deals frankly in child endangerment, sexual degradation, sacrilege, self-injury, violent death and the slow loss of a parent, and none of that is softened.
Where William Peter Blatty Found His Demon
Blatty (1928 to 2017) grew up in Manhattan in what he called comfortable destitution. His Lebanese mother supported the family by selling homemade quince jelly on the street, and they moved house, usually by eviction, dozens of times. It is hard to read Karras’s memories of his own mother without thinking of hers, and of how much of the author went into the priest.
Before this book he was known for comedy. He wrote scripts for Blake Edwards, including the Pink Panther film A Shot in the Dark, and he once won ten thousand dollars on Groucho Marx’s quiz show You Bet Your Life while posing as a Saudi prince, enough to quit his job and write full-time. The old priest of the prologue, Lankester Merrin, borrowed his first name and his look from Gerald Lankester Harding, a British archaeologist Blatty had met in Beirut, and the winged figure he confronts is Pazuzu, a genuine Assyrian demon.
The novel appeared in 1971. Two years later Blatty adapted it for William Friedkin’s film, won the Academy Award for best adapted screenplay, and saw it become the first horror film ever nominated for best picture. The revised 2011 text, his overdue second draft, is the one in print today, and The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty in that form is how he asked to be remembered.
What It Leaves Behind
The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty is a novel about two people who cannot bear what death has taken from them, an unbelieving mother and a priest who has lost his footing, and about what each of them is willing to give back. Its famous scenes are as harrowing as legend claims, but the lasting ones are smaller: a radio left playing, a rose on a plate, a joke told to a grieving friend. Readers drawn to children in peril and adults who cannot agree on what they are seeing should go next to The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. Those who want another old scholar facing ancient evil with ritual and nerve will find it in Dracula by Bram Stoker, and anyone moved by Karras should try Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory, the great novel of a failing priest who keeps going anyway.
The old man in khaki knew it was coming before anyone in Georgetown did. By the last page, The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty has made sure the reader cannot forget the sound of the wind that rose that night.