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.

John Constantine in Iraq

Hellblazer: Pandemonium, written by Jamie Delano, illustrated by Jock (2010): Delano returns to John Constantine (Hellblazer), the British occult investigator/magician character whose first 40 or so issues he wrote back in the late 1980's after Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, John Totleben and Rick Veitch created the character in Swamp Thing. He's working-class English and looks a lot like Sting, which explains why the movie Constantine had Canadian Keanu Reaves portray Constantine as an American living in Los Angeles. It makes perfect sense.

Delano has always been firmly in the Ramsey Campbell school of horror fiction -- wordy, literate, and concerned with evoking horror through off-kilter description moreso than sudden shocks or graphic violence, though both of those also have their role to play. Constantine is probably the world's greatest magician. He's also something of a bastard who tends to get his friends and companions killed during his forays against both supernatural and human evil. But he gets results, which has made him enemies in both Heaven and Hell.

Herein, coalition forces in Iraq track down Constantine in London, England to get his help with a peculiar occult problem they've discovered -- a prisoner who drives everyone crazy if he's not sedated. Soon, Constantine is waist-deep in blood as he tries to discover what the forces of Hell are up to in Iraq, though at least some of these demonic forces are also pagan deities (there's a brief shout-out to Pazuzu, the Babylonian demon who showed up in The Exorcist, while one of Constantine's demonic/pagan enemies from Delano's run on the comic also puts in a mythologically and geographically correct appearance).

With the help of a physically and emotionally scarred, Iraqi-born archaeologist, Constantine again manages to insert himself into the competing plans of governments and demons; Heaven, in this case, appears to be absent from the proceedings. I like Jock's art here more than I have on other projects -- he's understated in a way that reminds me of early Delano Hellblazer collaborator John Ridgway's art. The fantastic remains grounded, and dirty. Delano's become a better writer over the last 20-odd years -- there's none of the occasional straining for linguistic effect that could sometimes be a bit jarringly purple in early Hellblazer. Highly recommended.