A Book I Refused to Sell: The Exorcist

Book Too Bad to Sell: The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty

This one is not a book you can buy from me. I heard about, but didn’t see, the 1974 movie, so when I found this former bestseller at a benefit sale I bought it. I paid a dime. After reading the book I feel that I was overcharged.

Here’s what I knew could be expected from The Exorcist: A child, whose parents don’t believe in demons but who may be possessed by one, becomes ill and, in addition to all the normal disgusting things sick patients do, says a lot of bad words. A priest is called in to exorcise the demon. Priest dies. Child recovers. The only intellectual curiosity I was able to bring to this book was the question of whether it had more of a plot than that. The answer is that it has...but people never talked about the plot, because it’s an incompetent plot. Our standards for cheap horror stories have been raised by Stephen King. I can’t imagine how Blatty ever got this clunker printed.

The child’s parents are divorced. The father’s name is Howard. The child starts chatting with someone called “Captain Howdy” via Ouija board. (This device was marketed as a board game, along with Parchesi and Monopoly, in leaflets in cereal boxes in 1973.) The mother has a foul-mouthed alcoholic friend. When teachers note that the child has become hyperactive, she’s started using bad language just like Mommy’s friend Burke. Then the child really starts acting out, coming downstairs into a grown-up party and wetting the carpet. There’s a suggestion that Burke has been “outside” the child’s bedroom. The child’s not the only one who saw him.

So what does the mother do? She calls a doctor and starts frantically feeding the child psychiatric drugs. The child gets sicker. This actually happens and there’s nothing supernatural about it. The child doesn’t need exorcism, although Burke and the child’s mother might need that. The child needs detox.

But, for whatever reasons, Blatty didn’t spin a simple tale of the kind of child abuse by a family friend that was indeed going on in 1974. At the time there was a lot of sympathy for the idea that “a gentle sexual initiation” that didn’t obviously damage the body of a preadolescent child might be considered a good thing—or where the psychological consequences were the stuff of horror movies. But Blatty seems to want it to be part of the reality of the story that the evidence against Burke is just a bonus effect thrown in by a Demon of Fevers and Confusion. A lot of things apparently are being done, and we never find out who’s doing what.

Clearly the standards for popular horror fiction have been raised by Stephen King, whose novels may feature demons with the power to becloud characters’ minds (consider the powers of evil in Pet Sematary), but always make it possible for the reader, at least, to figure out what’s supposed to be going on.

Blatty, I suspect, just wanted to sell a lot of copies by breaking a current taboo. Certain rude words really had been unprintable, and seldom used in company that was “mixed” either in genders or in status levels, for long enough that some readers really wanted to read examples of how the words were used. Blatty did not actually tell them. In The Exorcist the sort of people who used bad language use it, but they don’t use it realistically; they use unprintable nouns where in real life they would have used unprintable verbs, and vice versa. The child utters obscenities she might have heard her mother actually use, but the laborers use obscenities like a lot of foreign exchange students who hadn’t been here very long.

The title suggests that The Exorcist ought to be a psychological study of a priest. Perhaps Blatty didn’t pick the title; he doesn’t even try to write anything so challenging. All three of the priests who get speaking parts are flat characters, given little more in the way of personality than the child. The narrative is such a flimsy connection between gross-out scenes that there’s room to imagine that Father Karras, the priest who gets the biggest part in the book, just might have been the baddie, the “sick priest” who, in the moments of doubt and depression we’re told he’s had, committed the blasphemies that awakened the demon. But if that had been what Blatty was trying to say, why didn’t he say it? Possibly because he wasn’t really trying to say anything; just trying to cash in on people’s fascination with the forbidden by writing a book with lots and lots and lots of formerly unprintable words in it. He shows no more concern with Karras’s soul than with Regan’s. Which makes his book a kind of psychological pornography.

The real deal breaker is that Blatty insisted not only on getting the rude words all wrong but also on getting the medical details all wrong. You don’t feed that much Librium to a 75-pound child in the hope that that child will ever go back to school again. Or walk.

So this one is not A Book You Can Buy From Me. If a child starts saying rude words just the way one of the parents’ friends does, it’s probably a bid for attention—needed attention. If the child says the parents’ friend has been outside the child’s bedroom, dumping a whole bottle of pills into the former friend as he lies concussed on the floor might be the sort of thing a jury would understand, but don’t even think about doping the child.