The Exorcist
by William Peter Blatty
Summary
Chris MacNeil, an actress filming in Georgetown, notices her twelve year old daughter Regan behaving strangely not long after Regan plays with a Ouija board found in the basement, the odd behavior escalating from attention seeking to violent, obscene convulsions no doctor can explain. When medical and psychiatric treatment both fail, one physician half seriously suggests an exorcism might work as its own kind of psychosomatic cure, whatever a viewer believes about its literal truth. Meanwhile a family friend, the film director Burke Dennings, is found dead outside the house, his head turned entirely around, a death that draws police lieutenant Kinderman into an investigation that increasingly circles back toward Regan's room. Father Damien Karras, a Jesuit trained as a psychiatrist and privately unraveling under guilt over his own mother's recent death, is called in to assess Regan and eventually becomes convinced, against his own crumbling faith, that she is genuinely possessed. The elderly Father Merrin, who has performed an exorcism once before in Africa, arrives to lead the ritual with Karras assisting, and dies of a heart attack partway through it, leaving Karras alone with Regan. In the novel's climax Karras goads the demon into abandoning Regan's body for his own, then throws himself through her bedroom window and down the same steep stone stairs where Dennings died, apparently reclaiming enough of his own will in his final seconds to make the death a real sacrifice rather than a possessed man's accident. Regan survives with no memory of what happened to her, and a young priest gives Karras last rites over his body in the street below.
Blatty grounds the horror in clinical, almost procedural detail, EEG readouts, psychiatric notes, police interviews, before the supernatural turn arrives, which makes that turn land harder than a more atmospheric approach might have. It reads quickly and stays genuinely unsettling for new readers decades later, even as some of the shock value that scandalized readers in 1971 has faded next to the quieter dread of Karras's private crisis of faith.
Historical Context & Significance
Harper and Row published The Exorcist on May 5, 1971, loosely inspired by an actual 1949 exorcism case involving a boy publicly known as Roland Doe. No literary prize marked the novel itself, and none is recorded as having considered it; horror fiction had no dedicated award comparable to the Bram Stoker Award, which did not exist until 1987. The book spent fifty seven weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, seventeen of them at number one, a commercial success that arrived without any critical prize attached to it.
Its honors belong almost entirely to William Friedkin's 1973 film rather than to the book that inspired it. That adaptation earned ten Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, and Blatty himself won the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, an award for turning his own novel into a script rather than for the novel. The film's reputation as one of the defining horror releases of its decade has, if anything, overtaken the source material in general memory, even though the novel's own sales far outran anything the film's box office alone could have driven.