The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty

Trigger warning for sexual violence.

Reading a classic scary story is always a chancy thing. Some scary stories have been so superseded by subsequent stories that they seem quaint in comparison and we wonder what all the fuss was about. Dracula comes to mind here. The ones that stick around often have something else that makes them stick in the brain. Frankenstein doesn’t have much power to freak us out these days but has plenty of food for thought when it comes to the ethics of science. William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist is the rare book that has both. Fifty-two years after its first appearance, The Exorcist still holds enough terror to make it a perfect Halloween read for me.

I’ve never seen the film version of The Exorcist but the story (film and book) made such an impact that I feel I knew a lot of what was going to happen through cultural osmosis. (This is why I’m going to skip my usual semi-summary of the plot.) In spite of this foreknowledge, I was still on the edge of my couch while I read the book. I read the whole thing in one day because I just had to know what was going to happen to Regan and her mother, Chris, and whether the two priests, Father Damien and Father Merrin, would manage to send the monstrosity back where it came from.

There are some areas where The Exorcist shows its age. Chris MacNeil’s girlish way of speaking grated a bit. I had a hard time taking her seriously as an adult because she cultivates such a girl-next-door persona, someone who says pits instead of dropping a mild swear. I suspect that Chris’s vocabulary would have sounded entirely natural in 1971. More interesting for me was the way that Father Damien, as he builds his case for an exorcism, is perfectly willing to accept telekinesis and telepathy as natural phenomena rather than supernatural ones. In the 1970s, extrasensory perception seems to have been much more plausible than we find it today.

Father Damien was the best part of the book. Regan is mostly a sketch of a child before she is possessed by whatever it is. Chris annoyed me as much as she earned my sympathy. Father Merrin is a bit of a deux ex machina. But Father Damien appealed to me. He’s got the same sort of world-weariness that the best noir detectives have. He’s seen everything and most of it was bad, and yet, he still hopes that god is real. He wants god and goodness and love to be real. When Chris comes to him in desperation, Father Damien is willing to throw himself into the fight (infernal or otherwise) because he can’t not help someone who is suffering. The climax of The Exorcist moved me much more than I expected for a book that I believed was all about the existential terror of possession and demonic evil.

The Exorcist is the best Halloween pick I’ve read yet. I’m going to have to give my horror fan colleague a big thank you for suggesting it.