Will I love The Exorcist?

This book revolutionized the possession subgenre.

I love how the story isn’t a typical paint-by-numbers possession and doesn’t go straight into the belief of a demonic presence. The author focuses on building the varying characters up before the exorcism begins, and I enjoy how Reagan is treated by doctors first, worried she’s ill due to family stress.

My favourite part of The Exorcist is how much focus is given to the exorcism once it starts. Plenty of other exorcism stories may only use the exorcism as a quick fix in the third act, but William Peter Blatty made it an… show more.

Blatty makes evil sound uncomfortably like us: petty, needling, relentless. It makes me think about how sometimes the scariest things aren’t demons, but what a people grab for when certainty slips.

The pages of The Exorcist brought me as close to the experience of true evil as I ever want to be.

Evil triumphant. Evil that seemed ultimately destined to remain triumphant. Beyond the capacity of feeble humans to even resist, much less to mount an attack and snatch back innocence from the demon’s control.

To read The Exorcist is to inhale fumes of hell. And the smell lingers.

I loved being along for the horror and challenge with the main character as he tries to exorcise a demon, really made the process come alive for me where before I sort of discounted the potential reality of it.

The novel took me by surprise. It was sitting on my Kindle for an age before I started reading and, initially, I struggled with Blatty’s style. It felt all over the place at first, overwrought and with more semicolons per page than I’ve used in total over the course of writing more than twenty books. It took me a while to get into the rhythm, but once I’d got it I was hooked. The narration felt detached, oddly remote from the unbearable emotions of a parent watching her child go through an appalling ordeal, powerless to help. It felt almost… show more.

One of the most disturbing and terrifying books of all time. I was shocked to find out that the author of this book was a Christian, and that is what led me to read this novel. I had heard about how horrific the film was and, despite my penchant for horror, I avoided both the movie and the book, considering them both demonic.

When I finally read the novel, I realized that this insane story reveals a truth regarding faith: to accept God and the reality of who He is, we must also acknowledge and accept the reality of demons… show more.

Blatty’s classic novel is recommendable as much for its cultural impact, which is of course inextricably bound up with its legendary film adaptation, as for its own content. With the story of young Regan, a 12-year-old girl in the modern technological world who becomes possessed by an ancient demon, Blatty, a committed Roman Catholic, deliberately set out to communicate a vivid sense of supernatural evil to a modern, skeptical, jaded audience. Many people don’t realize that The Exorcist is actually a Christian novel. As Blatty himself later put it, if he could get people to believe, even fictionally/emotionally, in… show more.

Speaking as a traditional, Latin-speaking Catholic, The Exorcist is more than a horror novel, but a classic tale of good versus evil and how a fallen man of God achieves redemption and his faith through courage and sacrifice. Author Blatty perfectly balances all horror with theological themes, which inspires all of my horror stories.

The most chilling part about this book is the way Blatty described the possession in such a descriptive way, it set the tone when you read each chapter. It was almost like a movie while reading. This book was chilling because Blatty did not spare any gory or horrific detail when describing the possession of an 11-year-old girl. The iconic 360 head spin was one of the creepiest things to imagine, but I could vividly see every sentence in my mind. The Exorcist is the only book that I will never read at night.

As monumentally terrifying as the film version is, the novel has some moments which easily rival the creepiness and revulsion of its cinematic counterpart. Actually, since reading a book requires extracting the image from the thought (whereas the film does the opposite), this makes The Exorcist novel just about as disturbing of an experience as can be had from reading.