I’ve read William Peter Blatty’s 1971 classic The Exorcist a couple of times, and each time I am disappointed.  I don’t care about any of the characters.  Regan is a whiny brat, Chris is more interested in her career than being a parent, Kinderman comes off as a bumbling fool (he, at least, is redeemed in the sequel, Legion), Merrin is only in the book for about ten pages.  Karras is the only character that I have the slightest bit of interest in.  I don’t find the demon, Pazuzu (which would make an awesome cat name) to be that scary, but it is monstrous in the way it manipulates Regan’s personality.

When the book opens she is a normal, healthy eleven year old, in the opening chapter she is clutching a stuffed panda, a far cry from what she will become.  A grown adult wouldn’t move us the way a child, the symbol of innocence, moves us when it is transformed into a monster.  At first Chris thinks Regan is sick when she talks with Captain Howdy (maybe a pair of cats?  Pazuzu and Captain Howdy!) on the Ouija board, they put her on Ritalin, which half of today’s kids are on, and from there she escalates to peeing on rugs, murder, cursing and risqué activities with a crucifix.  Blatty’s prose is very dense.  He assaults us with words and images, take a peek at this sentence from where Karras meets Regan:

“Then his eyes locked, stunned, on the thing that was Regan, on the creature that was lying on its back on the bed, head propped against a pillow while eyes bulging wide in their hollow sockets shone with mad cunning and burning intelligence, with interest and with spite as they fixed upon his, as they watched him intently, seething in a face shaped into a skeletal, hideous mask of mind bending malevolence.”

That’s a sentence.  Yes, it shows us the horror of what Regan has become, it’s a scary image, but I feel so exhausted while I’m reading it that I don’t care.  Each section of the sentence is legitimately awful, the way he never really refers to the creature as Regan continues to build the horror, especially, giving it a sense of “other”-ness.  However, stacking that on the eyes, on the face bleeds away some of the impact.  If he let the thoughts have the space they deserve, then I would be more on board with the book.  The book seems to amble through the story in an almost stream of consciousness sort of a way.  I want immediacy in the description.

The plot of the book never seemed scary to me.  Yeah, the kid was possessed.  It never struck home in the way that some of the others have.  I didn’t empathize with her the way I did with Frank’s monster or the Beast Folk.  I was never concerned that she would live or die, I could take it either way.  (After all the drugs they pumped into her, I’m a little surprised she didn’t die from that.)  I think I even felt closer to the great Cthulhu than I did the characters in the Exorcist.  It would be an interesting exercise to try and write a piece about a mother with a possessed child in which I try and feel that empathy that this piece lacks.

I’m going to get some cats now…