The Exorcist (1971) by William Peter Blatty

The Exorcist (1971) by William Peter Blatty: The best-seller that spawned a movie mega-hit (adjusting for inflation, its domestic box office would today be in the $400-$500 million range. That's domestic B.O. only!). It holds up well today, though a lot will be familiar if you've seen the movie -- William Peter Blatty adapted his own novel for the screen. Blatty was a screenwriter, so this makes a lot of sense.

Indeed, his most famous screen-writing assignment prior to The Exorcist was on the second Inspector Clouseau movie. Some of the movie-comedy stuff appears in The Exorcist novel, quippy exchanges and some lengthy comic riffs that didn't make the movie. Blatty liked a couple of them enough that he would use them 19 years later in The Exorcist III, which he wrote and directed. Apparently he didn't want the world to miss his 'Lemon Drop' and 'There's a carp in the bathtub' comedy stylings.

Do I need to recite the plot? The daughter of a Hollywood star falls ill while she and her mother are in Washington, D.C. filming a movie. Really ill. Possession-level ill! 

Most of the novel builds up to the climactic exorcism, which takes place with great brevity in the last 30 pages or so of the novel. Father Damien Karras, so hauntingly portrayed by Jason Miller in the movie, works to determine whether the possession is a possession or not. So, too, doctors. 

Meanwhile, Lieutenant Kinderman investigates the death of a Hollywood director who fell to his death on those crazy stairs beside the Hollywood star's rental. Fell. During a time when he was alone in the house with the daughter. Hmm. And his head was twisted all the way around.

Blatty keeps things humming along to the violent climax. The theological discussions are a bit half-baked, but this is a popular horror novel, so we'll give it that. As in the movie, Karras towers over everything as a tortured, sympathetic hero. Lieutenant Kinderman is a much larger presence here than in the film (played there by Lee J. Cobb and in The Exorcist III by an incandescent George C. Scott), which is too bad because he's really, really, really annoying. So annoying. He's half comic relief, half dogged detective, and all annoying.

But The Exorcist holds up, and popular novels generally don't. Hell, critically praised novels generally don't. Well worth a read, if only to discover the name of the demon afflicting Regan. Recommended.

This Novel Sucks

A Dark Matter by Peter Straub (2010): Peter Straub has been a fine writer of the supernatural for decades. A Dark Matter, though, is a dreadful piece of work. It's structurally and metaphysically ambitious -- I'll give it that -- but Straub's reach has far exceeded his grasp here.

The only horror novel from a major writer I can think of that's this bad in the same way is William Peter Blatty's exhausting, overly precious Legion, with its dollar-store profundities and its precious little toe-dips into actual philosophy, religion, and cosmology.

Yes. Of a certain type of horror novel, from 35 years of reading horror novels, I can say this is the second worst one ever. No wonder it won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel of 2010 from the Horror Writers Guild. It must have stunned the voters into a stupor.

Back in 1966, a group of high-school and college students were taken in by figuratively and literally rambling guru Spencer Mallon. They did something in a meadow. One person died. One person disappeared. Everyone was changed forever. Now, the one member of this group of students who didn't go into that meadow, novelist Lee Harwell, sets out to find out what really happened.

This isn't an unusual set-up for a horror story -- M. John Harrison's great novella "The Great God Pan" similarly and far more evocatively deals with the aftermath of such a supernatural event decades later.

A Dark Matter, though...phew. Lots and lots of telling rather than showing (to cite one example, we're endlessly and repeatedly told how everyone just absolutely loves "the wondrous Eel", Lee Truax, Harwell's 1966 girlfriend and 2009 wife, but her wondrousness is sparingly, parsimoniously, sketchily depicted).

We're told how magnetic and amazing Spencer Mallon was and is, but given very little to convince us that he is magnetic and amazing beyond everyone's love and adoration of him. And when we move into the more and more overtly supernatural...hoo boy. You'll never look at that iconic painting of dogs playing poker the same way again, let's just leave it at that. Or AstroTurf.

Silly, sketchy, ponderous, pretentious, pompous. Oh, and Lee Harwell, novelist and frame narrator, boy what a drag he is. He wears expensive shoes. He drinks expensive liquor. His horror novel once got him on the cover of Time magazine in the 1980's. He's a crashing bore who often repeats himself and doesn't seem to be gifted with an editor who will actually edit anything. And there's that wondrous Eel, doing nothing particularly wondrous until the very end. But she is so very wondrous, unlike this lousy novel. Not recommended.

Those Crazy Nazis

Comics:


Enemy Ace: War in Heaven, written by Garth Ennis and Robert Kanigher, illustrated by Chris Weston, Russ Heath and Joe Kubert: Hans Von Hammer, the WWI German "Enemy Ace" of 1960's DC war comics, gets a WWII send-off here, first on the Russian front and then in the Western European theatre as the Allies advance after D-Day. Ennis is fairly restrained here -- there is graphic violence, but for the most part this reads like an updated version of the Kanigher/Kubert stories from the 1960's (one of which is reprinted here). Like some members of the real Prussian military aristocracy, Von Hammer despises Hitler and the Nazi Party, but nonetheless feels obligated to fight for his country again after two decades of seclusion in his ancestral castle. There's plenty of airplane talk, not to mention a cameo from Sergeant Rock. Recommended.


Shade the Changing Man Volume 3: Scream Time, written by Peter Milligan, illustrated by Chris Bachalo, Bryan Talbot, Mark Pennington and Rick Bryant (1990-91; collected 2010): This third collected volume of early Vertigo hero Shade, revamped from his 1970's Steve Ditko creation with way more sex and violence, finally explains where the free-floating madness-generating American Scream actually came from, while also more fully explaining Shade's origins, Kathy's personal problems, and just what exactly Shade's solid-illusion-generating M-Vest is made of. Hint: it's not polyester. Heady, enjoyable stuff if you've read the first two volumes, and Jamie Hewlett's covers are as trippy as previous cover artist Brendan MacCarthy's. Recommended.


The Life Eaters, written by David Brin, illustrated by Scott Hampton (2003): Brin's aptly titled 1980's novella "Thor Versus Captain America" is the basis for this graphic novel; neither the novella nor this book are set in the Marvel Universe. Adapted for the first part of the graphic novel, the novella posits a world where the Nazis are on the brink of conquering the entire world in the early 1960's. The Holocaust was necromancy on an industrial scale, and it succeeded -- the Nazis summoned the Norse Gods on the eve of D-Day. The Normandy Invasion failed, the Allies were defeated again and again, and now the invasion of North America is imminent -- all because the Nazis now have Odin, Thor, the other Norse gods and various other Norse mythological creatures to call upon. Only Loki of all the gods stands with the Allies, and while his purposes are mysterious and probably self-serving, he did manage to evacuate the concentration camps and ghettos of Europe before the Final Solution had been entirely carried out.

Are the Norse Gods really Norse Gods? That's one of the first questions the novel tackles, before moving on to larger philosophical issues set against an escalating series of cataclysms. Humanity's hope ultimately lies in science and technology, something the mystical and increasingly addled servants of the gods just aren't good at, along with an alliance of the various world religions that refuse to practice the blood sacrifice which summons the gods and then sustains them: on this world, the Holocaust never ends because the gods live on human death in mass quantities. Other cultures summon their own pantheons in response to the Nazi threat, and things get worse and worse once we shift to the main action of the novel, in the 1980's.

This later segment could almost be called "Hulk and Iron Man Versus All the Gods in the World", as human ingenuity and self-sacrifice and, indeed, humility finally start to turn the tide of war even as Loki's true plan -- even more horrifying than those of his man-eating brethren -- is finally revealed. There's certainly action and adventure here, all in service to quite a serious-minded premise -- can humanity outgrow its tribal-minded, bloodthirsty nature before it's too late? Highly recommended.


Books:


A Treasury of Modern Fantasy, edited by Terry Carr (1980): It's actually taken me thirty years to finish off this survey anthology that spans fantasy from the advent of fantasy-specific pulp magazine Weird Tales in the 1920's to 1979. Most of the major writers are here, though Carr's selection criteria can be pretty wonky at times (I'm not sure I'd even put "The Rats in the Walls" on a top-20 list of all the stories H.P. Lovecraft wrote, but here it is in all its clunky glory). This volume never caught on as an academic tome, even though its selection, odd as it is sometimes, is nonetheless more wide-ranging and useful than such academy-oriented anthologies as Fantastic Worlds.

The sheer scope of the work that Carr wanted to survey must have driven him bonkers at times -- it's not all that easy to cover 60 years of high fantasy, dark fantasy, light fantasy, sword and sorcery, horror and the cryptozoological in one volume, and I'm not sure why that last (represented by the solid but unspectacular "Longtooth" by Edgar Pangporn) is even included, as it's more properly science fiction, a genre not folded into this anthology. Recommended.


The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty (1971): William Friedkin's blockbuster film adaptation of Blatty's best-selling novel was remarkably faithful to the book, partially because Blatty -- a screenwriter before becoming a novelist -- wrote the screenplay. Some things were, of course, left out, though a few such scenes made their way into the 1990's Director's Cut, while others were recycled by Blatty in the sequel he both wrote and directed, 1990's underrated Exorcist III: Legion.

Blatty's novel is long on dialogue at points, befitting a novel by a screenwriter, though there are also lengthy internal monologues which were essentially unfilmable. Coming to the novel after having seen the movie, one finds out more about the significance of the Iraq-set prologue of the movie, and more about the ins and outs of exorcism itself (though the latter needs to be taken with a grain of salt, actual Roman Catholic exorcisms being few and far between in the West).

Tortured, doubting priest Damien Karras comes even more to the fore in the novel, while details of the past of both possessed Regan and her actress mother explain at least some of the murkier details of the possession and its possible origins -- though ultimately the possession is less about getting Regan and more about forcing a second exorcism battle with ageing, ailing Father Merrin, played by Max Von Sydow in the movie. Some of the philosophical and theological speculation is awfully wonky at times, and the scientific aspects of the novel when the characters speculate on how the brain works are even wonkier. Still, a gripping read after all these years, though it's worth noting that the "true case" the novel is "inspired by" bears almost no resemblance to the novel. Caveat lector! Recommended.