William Peter Blatty wrote comedies for a living, then wrote The Exorcist, and spent the rest of his career being asked about the one book.
That’s the shape of it, and the comedy background is anything but a footnote. He wrote screenplays for Blake Edwards, including A Shot in the Dark, the best of the Pink Panther films. Once, he won a prize on a game show by pretending to be an Arab prince. He was a genuinely funny writer who happened to produce the most frightening novel of the twentieth century, and those two facts are far more connected than they look, because what he was actually interested in was the problem of a universe that seems to be running a joke at your expense.
The thing to know before you start is what he thought he was doing. Blatty said over and over that The Exorcist was built to argue God into the room: if a demon exists, then so does the architecture it fell from, and the presence of evil implies the thing evil is a departure from. He was a Catholic, and he meant every word.
He died in 2017. The William Peter Blatty books make up a small catalog, and one of them is doing all the work.
I haven’t read these. What follows is the critical consensus.
Fiction by René Rehn
The Short Version
Read The Exorcist. It’s a much better book than its reputation as a shock artifact suggests, and its actual subject is a priest losing his faith.
Then Legion if you want the sequel that works, and know that everything else is a curiosity.
The Essential
The Exorcist (1971)
Regan MacNeil is twelve years old, staying in Georgetown with her actress mother while a film shoots, and something in her begins to change.
The medical gauntlet comes first, and Blatty makes you walk every single step of it. Pediatric workups, neurology consults, scans and punctures, a pneumoencephalogram laid out in cold procedural detail, psychiatry as the last scientific resort, a proposed lesion of the temporal lobe. Only once medicine has completely exhausted itself does anyone finally say the word, and that long patience is what makes the possession land the way it does.
What the book is actually about is Damien Karras, a Jesuit who trained as a psychiatrist, whose faith is gone, and whose mother died in a New York walk-up with nobody beside her while her son was unreachable. The guilt is dismantling him piece by piece. Regan is the mechanism the story runs on. Karras is what it’s for.
And it’s funny, in stretches, a fact that blindsides anyone coming from the film. Kinderman’s scenes play as genuine comedy, and that’s the decade of screenwriting for Blake Edwards showing through.
He drew loosely on a 1949 case in Maryland he’d read about as a student at Georgetown. He also wrote the screenplay, and won the Academy Award for it.
Also on possession books and religious horror.
Legion (1983)
This is the real sequel, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with the film called Exorcist II, which Blatty had no involvement in and disliked.
Lieutenant Kinderman, the detective from the first novel, is investigating a series of murders in Georgetown twelve years later. The victims are being killed in a manner matching the Gemini Killer, who has been dead for over a decade, and those details were never released to the press.
The novel is largely Kinderman thinking. He talks to a priest, he talks to a psychiatrist, he walks, and he argues at length about the problem of evil, and Blatty hands him pages of theological reasoning that any thriller editor would have cut.
That’s exactly the point. Legion is a philosophical novel with a police procedural attached, and the horror in the neurology ward at its center is genuinely disturbing.
Blatty adapted and directed it himself as The Exorcist III, and the studio forced an exorcism into the ending against his wishes.
The Rest
The Ninth Configuration (1978)
A rewrite of his earlier novel Twinkle, Twinkle, “Killer” Kane, and Blatty considered it his best book.
A Gothic castle in the Pacific Northwest has been leased by the military as a psychiatric facility for officers who have broken down, and the open question is whether any of them are genuinely ill or whether they’re all malingering to avoid Vietnam. One of them is directing Shakespeare with an all-dog cast.
Colonel Kane arrives as the new psychiatrist, and he’s calm, gentle, and evidently carrying something.
The title comes from a probability argument about the odds of life arising by chance, which one of the patients uses as an argument for God, and the novel plays as a comedy for most of its length and then stops being one entirely.
The bar sequence near the end is extraordinary.
He filmed it himself in 1980, funded it largely with his own money, and it won the Golden Globe for best screenplay.
Dimiter (2010)
His last novel, published in 2010 after a gestation of more than twenty years, and it’s the strangest thing he wrote.
It opens in Albania in the 1970s, in Hoxha’s police state, where a prisoner is being interrogated who will not speak and cannot be identified, and the interrogator grows steadily more unnerved by him.
Then the novel moves to Jerusalem, to a hospital, and to a series of deaths that a police investigator is trying to connect.
The Albanian opening is the best writing Blatty ever did. It’s spare, frightening, and about a man being broken by somebody who refuses to participate in the process.
The Jerusalem sections run slower, the theology gets more explicit, and the two halves never join as cleanly as they should.
He dedicated it to his son Peter, who died in 2006, and it’s a book about whether death means anything, written by a man in his eighties who had lost a child.
Elsewhere (2009)
Late and slight. Elsewhere is a haunted house novella, and it’s his only other straightforwardly supernatural fiction.
The Comic Novels
He was a comic writer first, and for far longer than he was anything else, and the horror is a small part of the total output.
Which Way to Mecca, Jack? (1960) is a memoir of growing up as the son of Lebanese immigrants in New York, with a mother who sold quince jelly on the street, and it’s genuinely funny.
John Goldfarb, Please Come Home! (1963) is a novel about a U-2 pilot who crash-lands in a fictional Arab kingdom, which was filmed with Shirley MacLaine and sued over by Notre Dame.
He wrote screenplays for Blake Edwards all through the sixties, including A Shot in the Dark, the second Clouseau film and the best of them.
I’ll Tell Them I Remember You is a memoir about his mother.
He was working as a comedy screenwriter with a stalled career when he wrote The Exorcist, and the joke he told afterwards was that he had finally found something people would buy.
Where to Start
Read The Exorcist, and read it as a book about Karras rather than about Regan, because that’s what Blatty actually wrote.
Then Legion, which is the best of the William Peter Blatty books after it, and which almost nobody has read.
And read The Ninth Configuration if you want to understand what he was truly preoccupied with, which was never demons.
The canon it belongs to is on my horror classics page. The Exorcist is the founding text of my possession books list.
